Reese Witherspoon was only 19 when she filmed the movie “Fear” and its rude sex scene.
The 1996 film starred Mark Wahlberg as a charming high school student who turns out to be a murderer and convinces an innocent teenager, played by Witherspoon, to let him pet him. Witherspoon recently shared that she first heard about the scene on set and asked for a stunt double – which was turned down.
“I had no control over it,” she said Harper’s Bazaar said in an interview published Wednesday. “The script didn’t explicitly say that was going to happen. I think the director came up with that himself and then asked me on set if I would do it and I said no.”
“It wasn’t a particularly great experience,” Witherspoon continued.
The James Foley thriller was made years before Witherspoon established herself as an icon with films like Legally Blonde (2001) or as a powerful producer of award-winning projects like Gone Girl (2014) and Big Little Lies (2017). and The Morning Show (2019).
“I’m certainly not traumatized or anything, but it was formative,” Witherspoon told Harper’s Bazaar in a lengthy cover story about her career. “It made me realize where my place is in the filmmaking pecking order.”
She did not accuse Wahlberg or director James Foley of criminal misconduct. Foley representatives did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
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“I think it’s another one of those stories that made me want to become a change agent and someone who might be able to take a better leadership role in telling stories from a woman’s perspective rather than a man’s.” , Witherspoon told Harper’s Bazaar.
Witherspoon did just that with her production company Hello Sunshine, which also funded Wild (2014), Where the Crawdads Sing (2022) and Daisy Jones & the Six (2023).
The actor has previously spoken out about abuse in the industry. She revealed in 2017 that she had been abused since she was a teenager — and felt “genuine disgust at the director who attacked me when I was 16 and anger … that silence was a condition of my employment.”
Do you need help? Visit RAINN’s National Online Sexual Assault Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center website.
