Reese Witherspoon regrets living in Los Angeles during a time when she and her kids were dealing with “terrifying” encounters with the paparazzi.
In an interview with The New York Times, the “Morning Show” star, 49, looked back on her efforts to protect her children from the celebrity photographers who hounded them in the 2000s.
While married to Ryan Phillippe, Witherspoon welcomed her first child, daughter Ava, in 1999, and her second, son Deacon, in 2003. The “Legally Blonde” actress filed for divorce from Phillippe in 2006.
She recalls talking with Jennifer Garner about “navigating public interest in our kids and how we could protect them from pictures and paparazzi, because they would be everywhere,” Witherspoon said. “All over the schools and all over the cars.”
Once, as Witherspoon left church in LA with her young children, she remembers “a guy jumping on the hood of the car and on each side, three people pushing against the window banging on the door … and chasing us like it was a police chase, down the freeways. It was terrifying.”
Witherspoon said this was all “really hard on my kids,” who had “bad anxiety” as a result. She also remembered how people would yell “wildly inappropriate” things at them.
“I really regret living in LA during that time,” she shared. “I know it feels like they’re just taking pictures, but it would be like 25 people on the side of the soccer field photographing me and Ryan to see if we got along or we didn’t get along. And there’s a little boy and a little girl there.”
The “Big Little Lies” actress expressed sympathy for Britney Spears and other stars who had similar experiences with paparazzi at the time.
“She was a young mother trying to figure it out, away from home, being chased like an animal, and what that kicks up inside your body and what it does for you is very traumatic,” Witherspoon said. “I just have incredible compassion for people that went through that time period and were portrayed in a certain way by the media if they went to a nightclub vs. they went to the playground. It was a very punishing time for women who were in the spotlight.”
But Witherspoon told the NYT there was a shift after the rise of social media, when she and other celebrities could suddenly control when people saw their kids. “There was no longer a market to see pictures of my children because people were getting it for free,” she said.
Witherspoon moved her family to Nashville in 2006, according to Time magazine. After her divorce, the actress married talent agent Jim Toth, with whom she welcomed a son, Tennessee, in 2012. She and Toth divorced in 2023.
Speaking to Time in 2021 amid Spears’ conservatorship battle, Witherspoon reflected on how she and the pop star had similar experiences with the paparazzi but that she generally had a better reputation than Spears.
“What if the media had decided I was something else? I would be in a totally different position,” she said. “I want to say it’s my decisions or the career choices I made, but it felt very arbitrary.”
Witherspoon is starring in the fourth season of Apple’s “The Morning Show” and is expected to return for a third season of her HBO series “Big Little Lies.” She’s also an executive producer on “Elle,” a “Legally Blonde” prequel series on the way from Amazon Prime Video. Lexi Minetree will star in the lead role as a young Elle Woods.
