Despite popular belief, Witherspoon did not meet future husband Ryan Phillippe on the set of the 1999 film Cruel Intentions. Rather, “I crashed her party,” Phillippe explained to Pennsylvania newspaper The Morning Call of attending her 21st birthday bash, weeks before getting the script. “I went with a friend because I knew there would be free food and drinks. I was just sitting back in the corner pounding away the drinks when somebody walked over and introduced Reese to me.”
That’s when she made her move.
“I don’t know what came over me—maybe the seven Midori sours—but I told him, ‘I think you’re my birthday present,'” she recounted to Jane magazine in 1998. “He thought it was so flattering, and now that I think about it…how embarrassing!”
Later, when Cruel Intentions director Roger Kumble “was hanging out with Ryan one night,” he recalled to Cosmopolitan, they began discussing who should be cast as his girlfriend, “and I was like, ‘What about your girlfriend?'”
After some convincing (“She wanted to strengthen the character, and she was right,” noted Kumble), Witherspoon signed on. The couple wed three months after the film’s release, going on to welcome daughter Ava Phillippe in 1999 and son Deacon Phillippe in 2003 before separating in 2006. ‘Cause it’s a bittersweet symphony, that’s life.
Leave a Reply