Elle Woods, Melanie Smooter, and Madeline Mackenzie are just a few of the strong female characters Reese Witherspoon has brought to life through her performances on-screen. Now, through her burgeoning media company, Hello Sunshine, Witherspoon steps back from the spotlight and shines a light on other women’s stories.
Co-founded by Witherspoon and Strand Equity’s Seth Rodsky in 2016, Hello Sunshine aims to amplify diverse female voices and challenge perspectives through both adapted and original content. Reese’s Book Club operates under the Hello Sunshine umbrella, and each month since it was established in 2017, Witherspoon has used this online community to platform a novel by a female author showcasing an authentic, genuine, and women-centric story.
The cool not-so-secret of Reese’s Book Club is that while Witherspoon promotes “stories about women, written by women,” she also gets to option these stories for a chance to be adapted and produced by Hello Sunshine. This ingenious business strategy creates a profitable win-win scenario for both Hello Sunshine and the authors it spotlights. So far, 63 of the 100+ Reese’s Book Club Picks have made The New York Times Best Seller List, and six have been adapted into films or television series (see “Where the Crawdads Sing” and “Daisy Jones & The Six”).
Hello Sunshine has also produced a number of non-Reese’s Book Club shows, such as “Big Little Lies,” “The Morning Show,” and “Truth Be Told,” which have garnered 15 Emmy, SAG, and Golden Globe Awards collectively, as well as films, like “Your Place or Mine” and, most recently, “You’re Cordially Invited.” Additionally, the media company offers unscripted content, children’s animations, short series, and podcasts–with women and girls at the heart of every story.
Hello Sunshine’s mission to uplift women’s stories extends beyond the content they produce. Through their writer’s fellowship, LitUp, unpublished female and nonbinary writers can embark on an all-expenses-paid writer’s retreat, followed by three months of mentorship with a published author to polish a manuscript for publishing. LitUp fellows are then connected with vetted book agents and, later, receive direct marketing from Reese’s Book Club once their books are published.
The Hello Sunshine Collective, another of the company’s outreach initiatives, provides similar business mentorship to female entrepreneurs, content creators, and changemakers whose brand narratives align with Hello Sunshine’s tenets of female empowerment. Community is also a huge part of Hello Sunshine, and, besides their mentorship programs, it is fostered via the company’s yearly Shine Away conference that connects female storytellers as well as through its partnership with the non-profit IF/THEN to bring women to the forefront of STEM media.
Long before Hello Sunshine, Witherspoon made it her purpose to share stories with dynamic female perspectives. Her previous production company, Pacific Standard, now a subsidiary of Hello Sunshine, produced female-led movies, most notably “Wild” and “Gone Girl.” These films, like much of the media Witherspoon has since produced, center around complicated women seizing control of their stories–and not necessarily being the heroes we expect.
Hello Sunshine continues to champion stories that confront the reality of womanhood and all its mess, wonder, and resilience. Later this year, the company is set to release the “Legally Blonde” prequel show, “Elle,” with Prime Video as well as an AppleTV+ limited series based on Marissa Stapley’s best-selling crime novel, “Lucky.” Further on the streaming horizon, we can expect adaptations of Reese’s Book Club Picks, including Alexene Farol Follmuth’s “Twelfth Night” and Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Romantic Comedy.” And at the center of it all, women will continue to shift the narrative.
Words by Alex Armbruster
Graphic by Aubrey Lauer