“I Couldn't Keep The Lights On”: Reese Witherspoon Recalled Facing Major Financial Troubles At Her Production Company Even After “Big Little Lies” And “Gone Girl” Were Huge Hits
Reese Witherspoon is one of the most powerful women in Hollywood today, although her success didn’t come without a few learning curves.
In 2012, frustrated by the lack of roles for women in Hollywood, Reese cofounded the production house Pacific Standard, which went on to create movies like Wild and Gone Girl — both of which were based on books by female writers.
A few years later, in 2016, Reese founded Hello Sunshine, a production company with a goal to change how “all women are seen in media.” Hello Sunshine absorbed Pacific Standard, and since then, Reese and her team have produced hit projects like Big Little Lies, Daisy Jones & the Six, and The Morning Show.
With such huge titles attached to the company, it’d be easy to assume that things at Hello Sunshine were always plain sailing. However, Reese recently revealed that she had to make some serious changes before the business could thrive.
Speaking at Hello Sunshine's second Shine Away event on Saturday, the Oscar-winner recalled a difficult time after Big Little Lies first aired on HBO in 2017, saying she could barely keep her company running despite the show’s huge success.
“I thought, OK well, Big Little Lies won all these Emmys, and Wild and Gone Girl got all these Oscar nominations, and we made $600 million at the box office,” she said. “I had four employees, and I couldn’t keep the lights on.”
“I remember the accountant calling me, going, ‘You didn’t make enough money producing those three things to keep four employees,’” she continued. “So I was like, ‘I’m doing something wrong.’ And that’s when I had this aha moment. I was like, I need to have help. I don’t have a business plan.”
Amid the rough patch, Reese realized that there were some aspects of the business that she simply couldn’t manage on her own. Recalling the decision to have a friend help her create a business plan, she said it’s “good to know what you're not good at.”
Hello Sunshine soon brought in Sarah Harden as CEO, and Reese admitted that she spent much of the first year asking her “the dumbest questions you can possibly imagine.”
“We had secure funding, but I had no idea how to hire executives and create infrastructure and get lawyers and business affairs and financial people,” Reese said.
“I'm sure [Sarah] was like, ‘Oh my God.’ She'd go home and be like, ‘My business partner's an idiot. Like how did she not know?' But she was so patient with me and let me be vulnerable,” Reese said of her CEO. “And that vulnerability I think is what led to our success.”
Reflecting on the realization that she had to make changes and be proactive, Reese said there’s “a moment in all of our lives when you realize, ‘No, wait, no one's coming to help.’”
“‘No one’s coming to make that decision. For me, I have to make that decision,’” she said. “Being a single mom when I was in my late 20s, I had to make a lot of decisions for my two kids and a lot of financial decisions, too.”
In 2021, Reese sold a majority stake in Hello Sunshine to Blackstone-backed Candle Media. The deal — worth upwards of $900 million — made Reese the highest-paid female actor in Hollywood at the time, and now one of the wealthiest self-made women in America.
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