Reese Witherspoon thinks parenting would have been easier away from Los Angeles.
The Morning Show star recently reflected on the paparazzi craze earlier in her career and its impact on her kids with ex-husband Ryan Philippe, Ava and Deacon.
“They would be everywhere,” Witherspoon said of photographers in the 2000s in a New York Times interview published Saturday. “All over the schools and all over the cars. I remember at church once in L.A., a guy jumping on the hood of the car and on each side, three people pushing against the window banging on the door when my kids were little after I got a divorce and chasing us, like it was a police chase, down the freeways. It was terrifying.”
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The Sweet Home Alabama star said she wishes she had relocated her family during that period. “It was really hard on my kids. Anxiety-producing,” she said. “I really regret living in L.A. during that time. I know it feels like they’re just taking pictures, but it would be like 25 people on the side of the soccer field photographing me and Ryan to see if we got along or we didn’t get along. And there’s a little boy and a little girl there.”
Witherspoon later elaborated on how her fame affected her children. “My kids had really bad anxiety. And it was all external,” she said. “You can only shield them from so much, but when [paparazzi] can go to the playgrounds and are on the schoolyard, it feels like the world is chaos and there are no rules. They would yell things at the kids about their dad or me that were wildly inappropriate.”
The Legally Blonde actress explained that paparazzi would film and unsympathetically edit the footage of these kinds of encounters. “These videos exist. And then they would only show the one part where I was screaming back at them, going, ‘Get back in your cars, leave us alone,'” Witherspoon recalled. “I’m not trying to garner sympathy. It was my life. I just didn’t know that was what would come with wanting to be an actor.”
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Witherspoon added that she was thrilled when social media gained traction because it gave her control of her family’s privacy. “Jennifer Garner and I got on the phone and we were like, ‘Oh, my God, we can decide when people have pictures of our kids? Sign me up,'” she recalled. “It devalued that market. There was no longer a market to see pictures of my children because people were getting it for free.”
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She also sympathized with another star had even more troubling experiences with the paparazzi.
“I watched them chase Britney Spears,” she said. “She had two little children and I had two little children, and I felt like it was this really unfair portrayal of her as a ‘bad girl,’ and that I was a ‘good girl.’ She was a young mother trying to figure it out, away from home, being chased like an animal, and what that kicks up inside your body and what it does for you is very traumatic.”
