Reese Witherspoon got candid about becoming a young mom while married to her first ex-husband, Ryan Phillippe, in the late 1990s.
“There was so much I didn’t know,” the “Morning Show” star shared on “The Interview” podcast Saturday.
The actress, who was married to Phillippe from 1999 to 2008, explained that she didn’t realize the sacrifices she would have to make in her acting career after giving birth to their daughter, Ava, in 1999.
“And maybe that naïveté was good, because it’s like, ‘Oh, I’ll just do that and have a career,’” Witherspoon, 49, continued. “And I did have a few people say to me, ‘This is going to be really hard on your career.’”
The “Big Little Lies” star explained there “were roles [she] couldn’t take,” as she navigated balancing her “family and career, being a mom and being a working actress.”
“That’s why it was also scary when ‘Legally Blonde’ became such a big hit,” she said, referring to the 2001 Robert Luketic-directed drama. “I wasn’t going to beg for parts; parts were coming to me.”
Witherspoon claimed it became “scarier” to pick and choose what she would invest her time into.
The “Man in the Moon” star also shared that fellow celebrities warned her not to “play a mom” onscreen, saying it would “make [her] seem old.”
“And I was like, ‘But, I am a mom,’” she recalled. “There was so much about our business that desexualized you, so you couldn’t be a movie star if you played a mom.
“And thank goodness, that’s sort of going by the wayside. But that was a big part of when I was in my 20s and 30s: ‘Don’t play a mom. No men will desire you, or nobody will want to go see that movie because nobody wants to see a movie about a mom.’”
The actress shared that her close pal Jennifer Aniston “was really helpful” in helping navigate her personal life and the media early on in her career when they played siblings on the ’90s sitcom “Friends.”
Witherspoon recalled the cast, including Aniston, 56, and Courteney Cox, being warm and open to her motherhood journey.
“I remember I brought my baby, Ava. Ava was only three months old when I was on ‘Friends’ in 1999,” she remembered.
“And I remember Courteney and Jen coming to my dressing room and knocking on the door and going, ‘We heard you have a baby!’ I was like, ‘I do. I have a baby!’ They were like, ‘Can we see it? Oh, my God, this is so cool.’”
Witherspoon claimed the “kindness opened a door for [her] to ask Jennifer a lot of questions when [she] went through breakups or a really public divorce.”
The “Legally Blonde” star and Phillippe, 51, are the parents to Ava, 26, and son Deacon, 21.
Witherspoon then married her second ex-husband, Jim Toth, in 2011. They welcomed a now 12-year-old son, Tennessee James, together before divorcing in 2023.
