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.”
To be sure, Witherspoon also worked incredibly hard as an up-and-coming actress, even attributing her great success to anxiety.
“I was probably successful because I had so much anxiety. They go hand in hand,” she recently told Harper’s Bazaar U.K. “I had pressured myself to extreme levels to show up at work in a perfect way.”
Witherspoon admits, though, that mentality isn’t one to keep.
“We all now know, perfect is not attainable. It’s not sustainable,” she said. “I stressed myself out in service of my job, and it got me really, really far. I’m rewarded for my anxiety and perfectionism.”
How AI has shaped acting careers
AI has undoubtedly come for white-collar jobs by replacing entry-level workers with tech-based workflows. But AI has also fundamentally changed the entertainment industry, too. Take Disney’s recent announcement of a $1 billion partnership with OpenAI’s Sora, as an example.
Although some analysts say the OpenAI/Disney deal effectively ended the “war” between AI and Hollywood, the conflict between technology and acting has been waging on for years. The partnership allows for more than 200 Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars characters to appear inside OpenAI’s Sora video-generation app, meaning more people can be creators.
AI has transformed acting through digital de-aging, voice cloning, performance alterations, reshaping faces, smoothing dialogue, and re-creating deceased actors’ likenesses. Some have even called AI “enemy No. 1” in Hollywood, even though many award-winning films include the technology.
This has also meant, though, the entertainment industry’s ethics and standards will continue to be called into question as consumers start to doubt the authenticity of content.
“People are going to want to go outside and meet or go to the theater,” Nicholas Grous, director of research for consumer internet and fintech at ARK Invest, recently told Fortune’s Nick Lichtenberg. “Like, we’re not just going to want to be fed AI slop for 16 hours a day.”
And it also means actors will need to work harder than ever to prove their value.
“It’s a different, challenging time,” Witherspoon said. “That said, the incredibly talented people will always rise, right? Even in a glut of information, real talent survives and thrives.”