I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal called “Reese Witherspoon’s New Role: Power Broker.” The title of the article immediately intrigued me: growing up, the name Reese Witherspoon conveyed images of the Playboy Bunny turned Harvard Law graduate Elle Woods, and I had never assumed that Reese had followed a similar path of ambitious career-building in her real life. The article describes how Witherspoon, tired of being offered roles of bland, one-dimensional female characters, teamed up with her friend and producer Bruna Papandrea to create a production company called Pacific Standard, that would focus on obtaining and producing stories of complex, female characters.

I really admire the way in which Witherspoon took a very real and prominent problem in the industry she was working in, and decided to tackle it hands-on. Two of the very first scripts that Pacific Standard worked with were that of Gone Girl and Wild, purchased even before the books had been released and become best sellers. Witherspoon invested her own money in Wild, which she would later star in; both movies received a variety of awards nominations. It takes an incredible faith to be able to trust in one’s gut that something is going to be a success; if Pacific Standard had failed with these two initial projects, their company would have been regarded as a farce. As a huge fan of Gone Girl and Wild, it was interesting to hear that those movies weren’t accidentally great achievements for women in Hollywood- in fact, they were very deliberate, calculated efforts to make movies that featured complex, and very “unattractive” female leads. Witherspoon describes how the script for Gone Girl, specifically, was rejected from several studios before finding a place at Universal Studios.

While Reese (as I feel comfortable calling her now) and I may have started off from very different places in our career journey, I can’t help but be inspired by the sheer guts she showed by creating a production company centered around women in an industry dominated by men. She showed a certain type of boldness in taking something she loves to do- reading- and combining it with an industry that she loves to work in. In the article, Witherspoon describes how she reads up to two books a week, and constantly visits independent bookstores in order to keep her eyes open for new literary stories. Though I don’t think I’ll be working in the film industry, I believe that that type of faith in oneself, and one’s ability to create change in a seemingly cemented set of circumstances, is important to have in any industry.

I don’t know just yet if I have that ability to trust in my gut as much as Reese does; still, after getting the job for this summer, I’ve been feeling a lot more confident in my ability to do whatever I like in the professional field of my choosing. After all, I got a job interviewing alongside people who had way more experience than me. While it’s too early to start planning ahead for next summer, the new experiences that this summer and upcoming sophomore year will bring me have me feeling more confident in who I’m becoming as a person. Reese’s story proves that this confidence- in one’s taste and in one’s ability- can be all that really matters.