Reese Witherspoon’s big break came in 2001, when she was 25 years old, starring in Legally Blonde as the iconic Elle Woods. But the award-winning actress actually started modeling and doing local TV commercials when she was just 7 years old, and had her first major film role when she was just 14 years old, in 1991, for the coming-of-age drama The Man in the Moon.
Today, Witherspoon is the founder of media company Hello Sunshine and is worth about $400 million. She sold her company in 2021 to two former Disney execs for $900 million, but she still oversees operations and remains on the company’s board. But she recently said if she had tried to come up as an actor today, she wouldn’t have had as much success.
“I don’t think my career would be possible,” Witherspoon told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang. “It’s a different world.” Witherspoon’s response was to Chang’s question regarding how different Witherspoon’s career would have been if she had started her career during the age of AI and algorithms.
“I see young people and I have so much compassion for young performers and actors because they have to be the producer, the director, they have to shoot their own videos, they have to market themselves,” Witherspoon continued. “That’s not something that I understood when I was 20 years old.”
