Reese Witherspoon once recapped the plot of her 2010 movie How Do You Know on a plane after the in-flight movie stopped working.
The actress and producer told Seth Meyers on Tuesday’s Late Night that she was once on a five-hour flight, during the time when there was one in-flight movie for the entire plane, and the film turned out to be How Do You Know.
After being embarrassed that her movie was being screened, she went on to embrace it when the film stopped playing shortly after it began.
“Probably, maybe 10 minutes into the in-flight movie, it cut out, and the clip broke or the tape broke or something,” Witherspoon recalled, saying that everyone on the plane appeared to be looking at her and whispering that she was on board.
So she went up to the front of the plane and asked the flight attendant if she could borrow the microphone.
“I was like, ‘Hi, guys. I don’t think the movie’s coming back, so I’m just gonna walk you, beat by beat, [through] what happened,’” she said, proceeding to recap the plot of the film for passengers.
“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,” she said. “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 gonna happen! Am I gonna go with Owen Wilson? Am I gonna go with Paul Rudd? What’s gonna happen? And they were like, ‘Yes!’ It was really fun.”
She added later, “It was actually so fun and funny to get to tell people the entire plot of my movie in like three minutes.”
And Meyers joked the airline could’ve marketed it as a perk: “I just like that those people, for the rest of the year, were telling people, ‘You gotta fly United because the movie never finishes, but they have the star there and they will talk you through it.’”
The Sony film, which was written and directed by James L. Brooks and also starred Jack Nicholson and Kathryn Hahn, received mixed reviews and grossed less than $50 million at the global box office. The Hollywood Reporter previously revealed it cost $120 million to make.
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During her appearance on the NBC late night show to promote her upcoming rom-com Your Place or Mine, which starts streaming Friday on Netflix, Witherspoon also shared that she ran into an aspiring acting student when she was running an errand prior to appearing on Meyers’ show.
“I just ran into a chocolate store because I’m trying to buy chocolates for my kids for Valentine’s Day,” Witherspoon recalled. “And this girl goes, ‘Oh, my God, are you Reese Witherspoon?’ I was like, ‘Yeah! I am.’ And she’s like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m an acting student. What should I do?’ and I was like, ‘First you do this and then you do this and audition your butt off. You’re not going to get every job but just work your tail off.’ And I thought I’m so, so lucky to have people like that in my life.”
Meyers pointed out that the errand itself sounded like something out of a rom-com, which she agreed with, noting that she grabbed a large, heart-shaped box, too.
Witherspoon also talked about why she wanted to make a movie for a streaming service.
“So many people can’t leave their house. They can’t go places. They’re taking care of kids. They have older parents,” she said. “They’re exhausted, and all they want to do is just sit on the couch.”
Witherspoon also just wrapped the third season of Apple TV+’s The Morning Show, saying it was one of the longest projects she’d worked on.
“This has been five years of my life, three seasons, 10 episodes each. Jennifer Aniston and I were talking about it the other day — it’s like making five movies, so it’s like we made 15 movies,” she said.
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