Reese Witherspoon: Spirited Youth

Reese Witherspoon reminds me of the girl everyone wanted in high school but couldn't get. She's wholesomeness incarnate, clean-scrubbed and likable as can be. Ever since The Man in the Moon, her debut as an independent Southern preteen, Reese has cornered the market on complex adolescence, a market her contemporaries who specialize in tough and trashy (think Drew Barrymore) aren't able to reach.

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Now Reese will put a spin on her good-girl image in the upcoming hostage-as-celebrity satire S.F.W., where she finally gets to be bad.

Balancing acting life with family life, however, isn't always a breeze. "It's tough making movies. Six months out of the year I live entirely with strange adults, and then I come home to Tennessee and live with my parents for the rest of the year, just trying to be a normal kid." Having just finished shooting her fourth movie and not even out of high school yet, Reese isn't my idea of your typical normal kid. And, although she claims, "We have our fair share of careless drug-taking and careless sex in Tennessee," I don't associate car-crashing and school-ditching youth with Reese. Sure enough, Reese tells me, she's at the top of her class and manages to squeeze in such hobbies as cheerleading. And, no, she's not the product of cunning parents who push their children into casting calls. Reese has engineered her own career since age seven when she started as a model.

Now that she's developed her sweet-sass appeal, she hopes to shake things up a bit with the new S.F.W. "S.F.W. stands for 'So Fucking What,'" she explains. "It's about how easily the American public swallows anything the media feeds them. Every other word in S.F.W. is fuck! The point is that you say fuck so often, the word is devoid of meaning."

S.F.W. may have Reese cast as a jaded kid with a gutter mouth, but it doesn't involve nudity. "The thing that pisses me off most about Hollywood is that most of the scripts I read nowadays want 16-year-old girls to take off their clothes," she rails. "It's so gratuitous. Personally, I have a big problem with millions of people seeing my bare ass! It would have to be a real smooth talker to get these clothes off me."

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Michael Atkinson