Reese Witherspoon said in a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar that filming a sex scene at 19 years old for the 1996 thriller “Fear” was not “a particularly great experience.” Directed by James Foley, “Fear” stars Witherspoon as a teenager who falls for a sinister young man played by Mark Wahlberg. One of the film’s buzziest scenes centers on Witherspoon’s character having an orgasm on a rollercoaster while being pleasured by Mark Wahlberg’s character.
“I didn’t have control over it,” Witherspoon said about filming the sex scene, adding that she requested a stunt double be used for the below-the-waist shots. “It wasn’t explicit in the script that that’s what was going to happen, so that was something that I think the director thought of on his own and then asked me on set if I would do it, and I said no. It wasn’t a particularly great experience.”
“I’m certainly not traumatized or anything by it, but it was formative,” Witherspoon added. “It made me understand where my place was in the pecking order of filmmaking. I think it’s another one of those stories that made me want to be an agent for change and someone who maybe can be in a better leadership position to tell stories from a female perspective instead of from the male gaze.”
Prioritizing the female gaze has become a calling card of Witherspoon’s production company Hello Sunshine, which has backed high-profile projects centered on female leads such as “Gone Girl,” “Wild,” “Big Little Lies,” “Where the Crawdads Sing” and recent Emmy nominee “Daisy Jones & the Six.”
Elsewhere in her Harper’s interview, Witherspoon remembered losing out on desired leading roles in “Clueless” and Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet.”
“Oh my God, I wanted to do ‘Romeo + Juliet’ so badly, so badly,” Witherspoon said. “Of course, Claire Danes was amazing, but it was devastating to me that I didn’t get it after screen tests and getting really close.”
Next up for Witherspoon is a return to “The Morning Show,” her Apple TV+ drama series that is premiering a third season this September.
