Subscribe to the RSS Feed

Follow GRW on Twitter

Follow GRW on Pinterest

View All   /   Become One

Glamour Reese Witherspoon is an unofficial fansite dedicted to supporting and promoting the career of Reese Witherspoon. We have no contact with Ms Witherspoon or her family or management. No copyright infringement is intended through the use of content within this website ...
Disclaimer     Privacy Policy     DMCA

MoviesOnline sat down recently with Reese Witherspoon at the Los Angeles press day for her new movie, Penelope, a modern day romantic tale about a girl coming to terms with who she is. Witherspoon produces and stars in the film which is directed by Mark Palansky from a script by Leslie Caveny. She also talks about Four Christmases, Children’s Defense Fund (in which she says she is going to New Orleans again next month), the Oscars, and so much more. Be sure to check it out!

Penelope Wilhern (Christina Ricci, Sleepy Hollow), born to wealthy socialites (Catherine O’Hara, Home Alone, and Robert E. Grant, Gosford Park), is afflicted by the Wilhern spell that can only be broken when she finds love. Hidden away in her family’s estate, the lonely girl meets a string of suitors in her parent’s futile attempt to break the curse. Each eligible bachelor is enamored with Penelope and her sizable dowry … until her curse is revealed.

Reese Witherspoon has a bone to pick — the Oscar-winner is sick of being known as Hollywood’s most obsessively organised actor.

The 31-year-old says she often regrets giving her film company the name Type A Productions — a tongue-in-cheek choice the self-confessed perfectionist made many moons ago.

“People immediately assume that I have a very controlling personality,” Witherspoon says with a sigh.

“It’s up for interpretation that term — Type A — and to me it was just about getting things done and being diligent about them happening, which didn’t seem very negative, but sometimes people think of it as a very uptight personality trait.

“I’m just much more easygoing than that — I go with the flow.”

Reese is currently in Rome, Italy to promote Rendition alongside director Gavin Hood and co-star Jake Gyllenhaal. They attended the press conference just a few moments ago and she looks super cute! I’ve added the first images for your viewing pleasure. Read on for a reportage on what Reese, Jake and Gavin had to say about the film.

Hailing from a country where an apartheid-era state death squad operated under the name Civil Co-operation Bureau, South African film maker Gavin Hood strips away at another sinister euphemism in his latest movie Rendition.

Speaking at a news conference at the Rome Film Festival where the film screened Sunday, Hood said: “Extraordinary renditions, enhanced interrogation – these are just fancy words. We wanted to put a human face to these abstract ideas.”

Continue reading this entry »

Actress’s all-American appeal helps film get message across, director says

Before her latest film, if anyone had asked Reese Witherspoon what the term “extraordinary rendition” meant, she might have answered with a blank stare.

The words could be bureaucratese for something as innocuous as a tax deduction. But as Witherspoon’s Rendition spells out darkly and melodramatically, the term actually stands for a U.S. government practice of transferring terrorism suspects to other countries, where their interrogations could subject them to abuse and torture.

“I don’t think I realized what the term was called,” Witherspoon told The Associated Press at September’s Toronto International Film Festival, where Rendition played in advance of its theatrical release Friday. “The term is not really in the popular vernacular.

“It sounds like public-policy rigmarole. It doesn’t sound like anything that you would connect with the torture and detainment of innocent people.”

Reese Witherspoon made her first film, The Man In The Moon, aged 14. Last year, she won an Oscar for her portrayal of June Carter Cash in Walk The Line and later separated from her husband Ryan Phillippe. Her new film Rendition is about the transfer and harsh interrogation of US non-citizens in countries where they are suspected of terrorism.

Did Meryl Streep’s involvement in this film help attract you to the project?
Of course. I was nervous the day I had to work with her. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do it but she was wonderful. She’s completely intimidating, completely professional and had a thousand ideas – but as soon as you cut, she’s the nicest, warmest, funniest person.

Who else has intimidated you on set?
Matthew Broderick when I did Election. I’d grown up watching his films and always thought he was so funny. He had that wonderful wry comic wit. I was more scared to meet Matthew than anyone I’ve ever worked with. He was an icon and I had a crush on him when I was little. I used to think he was so cute.

Did you tell him?
Of course not! And I certainly never told his wife.

Have you ever felt prejudice in your own life, as you and your husband do in Rendition?
Yes, when I went to Stanford University when I was 19. I’d already done several films and I really felt this prejudice against me because I was an actress. Some of the students thought I’d only got in there because I was an actress but I applied the same way as everyone else under my real name, which is not the same as my acting name.

Smart steel magnolia that she is, Reese Witherspoon is coming home to serious fare after time away from the screen.

The 31-year-old actress – who had big hits in confections like the Legally Blonde movies, Sweet Home Alabama and Just Like Heaven – stars in Rendition as Isabella, a Chicago woman whose husband, an Egyptian-born chemical engineer (Omar Metwally), is suspected by U.S. authorities of having knowledge of a bombing; with no charges leveled, he’s flown to North Africa for a cruel secret interrogation. Through several characters’ viewpoints, director Gavin Hood’s drama, opening Friday, peers unblinkingly into the confusion and conscience-searching that the war on terror has wrought.

For Witherspoon, whose first film, at 14, was The Man in the Moon, Rendition allowed her to continue a professional route that hit a peak with her Best Actress-winning performance as June Carter Cash in 2005′s Walk the Line.

“The film [addresses] an issue you read about, but may not feel connected to,” Witherspoon says. “I’m really lucky that I’m able to do [movies] like this, and that people accept me doing different things.”

Here is fantastic interview with Reese and the cast mates of Rendition Press Conference from Movies.About.com. Although spoiler phoebes be warned! It does contain quite a few things you may not wish to know just yet! There is a cut off point, so if you’re wanting to remain spoiler free do not read past it, or heck just wait until you’ve seen the film and come back for this one, it will be here.

The term ‘extraordinary rendition’ refers to the U S government’s policy of secretly abducting foreign nationals who are viewed as national security threats and placing them in overseas prisons in order to ‘interrogate’ them. The film Rendition follows an Egyptian-American businessman who’s placed into custody upon arriving back in the US from a business trip and taken to North Africa to be questioned – and tortured. Director Gavin Hood and the film’s stars Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Igal Naor, and Omar Metwally took part in a press conference in Los Angeles to discuss their involvement in the dramatic movie.

Reese and Jake, why do you think people would want to see a movie about this policy?

Reese Witherspoon: “Why wouldn’t they?”

Why would they?

Gavin Hood: “I think your answer was good: why wouldn’t they?”

What’s a nice girl like Reese Witherspoon doing mixed up with government-sanctioned kidnapping and torture?

“I think it’s really easy to think about (awful) things in the abstract,” says the Oscar-winning actress of her role in the new movie Rendition, “but when you have an emotional, human experience that connects you to the people affected by these things, it can really change your perception about whether or not they’re … ethical? Constitutional? Certainly it raises awareness about (extraordinary) rendition and whether or not it is those things.”

Despite looking a little tired on another day of publicity at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel, she appears every inch the gracious, well-mannered woman of Southern upbringing she is reputed to be. Witherspoon shot to the top of the box office rankings with her two “Legally Blonde” films (in which she played Elle Woods) and a handful of romantic comedies that polished her all-American-girl image. Not to be pigeonholed, however, she followed those with her widely lauded turn as June Carter in the drama about Johnny Cash, Walk the Line. Defying social expectations of women has been a theme of the Nashville native’s life and career.

Reese Witherspoon is sitting on a dais in a ritzy Beverly Hills hotel with Jake Gyllenhaal and some of the other stars from her latest film, Rendition, along with the director, Gavin Hood. They’re answering questions about the film, a dramatic thriller about one of the most controversial aspects of the “war on terror”, the practice of “extraordinary rendition”. That’s the heavily criticised procedure used by the CIA to secrete suspected terrorists to countries such as Egypt and Morocco, where they can be interrogated – and tortured – without being subject to US law.

Witherspoon plays the wife of an American-Egyptian chemical engineer who disappears after boarding a flight from Cape Town. She gradually learns that her husband is suspected of being a terrorist, and has been “rendered” by the CIA to a North African country, evidently Morocco. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the CIA analyst charged with overseeing her husband’s interrogation, who becomes troubled by the morality of what he and the US government are doing.

As they answer questions, I find I’m not really listening. I am transfixed by Witherspoon, whom I am going to be meeting in person in a few minutes. She’s the only woman on the panel of six, and, even at a distance, her very blonde hair and very blue eyes, sitting within exquisitely tiny features, are quite mesmerising among the heavy-set, dark-haired men up there. It’s incredibly hard to grasp that this tiny creature, who looks as fragile as a miniature porcelain doll, is by far the most successful, most powerful and best-paid person in the room.

MoviesOnline features a fabulous Rendition interview with Reese, Jake Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, which includes all kinds of interesting things about the flick.

MoviesOnline caught up recently with director Gavin Hood (Tsotsi) and the cast of Rendition at the Los Angeles Press Conference to promote their new film. Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Igal Naor, Meryl Streep, Peter Sarsgaard and Alan Arkin star in this edgy and thought-provoking thriller about an Egyptian-born chemical engineer, Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), who disappears on a flight from South Africa to Washington.

Continue reading this entry »