Reese Witherspoon once did an elevator pitch on a plane…literally.
The rom-com queen explained the entire plot of 2010 film “How Do You Know” to her fellow passengers after the in-flight movie player stalled.
“Back when they used to have one movie that played on airplanes, it was like a five-hour flight and I walk in and they’re like, ‘And the movie today is going to be “How Do You Know” starring Reese Witherspoon,'” she explained during “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”
“I was like, ‘Oh my God. I have nowhere to hide. This is so embarrassing,'” Witherspoon said, before revealing one perk. “Probably, maybe 10 minutes into the inflight movie, it cut out, and the clip broke. So I went to the front of the plane and I got on the microphone…I was like, ‘Hi, guys. I don’t think the movie’s coming back, so I’m just going to walk you, beat by beat, [through] what happened.'”
Witherspoon detailed the plot of her playing a former U.S.A. softball champion who was cut from the national team and finds herself caught in a love triangle between a fellow professional baseball player (Owen Wilson) and a corporate executive (Paul Rudd) whose father (Jack Nicholson) has suspicious business dealings.
“So, first of all, I’m going out with Owen Wilson. It’s not going well. And he’s a professional baseball player, and you know that’s gonna go south,” Witherspoon explained. “So, I have this crazy great date with Paul Rudd, but his dad is asking him to go to jail for him because he’s committed a crime. Guys, I don’t know what’s going to happen! Am I going to go with Owen Wilson? Am I going to go with Paul Rudd? What’s going to happen? And they were like, ‘Yes!’ It was really fun.”
She added, “It was actually so fun and funny to get to tell people the entire plot of my movie in like three minutes.”
Witherspoon’s latest romantic comedy, “Your Place or Mine,” co-stars Ashton Kutcher and debuts on Netflix February 10. The star said of the genre itself, “It’s just not like taking a test. You know how some movies where you’re like, ‘What was I supposed to get out of that? I just feel bad.’ Or, ‘Oh, I’m supposed to feel embarrassed that I don’t know about it.'”
Fellow rom-com icon Kate Hudson recently addressed how the genre has been “dumbed down” in recent years and the misconceptions of the tropes at its core.
“[They need] an actually good story, let’s start with that,” Hudson said. “I think sometimes people think rom-coms are all about the ‘meet cute.’ A great rom-com is about meeting love, discovering love, falling in love, love falling apart, and then how you come back together. That’s a very traditional rom-com structure.”
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