Reese Witherspoon practices what she preaches.
Amid a national reckoning in multiple industries regarding sexual harassment and inequality in the workplace, the Oscar winner continues to passionately pave the way for women beside her and behind her.
As a leading force in the Time's Up initiative and at the helm of her own production company, Pacific Standard, she not only brings female characters to life on screen, but the mogul also plays a significant role in shaping them behind the scenes. Moving forward, she's encouraging women everywhere to effect the kind of change they want to see in their own fields.
"The female leaders within every industry have to stand up for those who are voiceless and silent, and we have to do better to create more balanced cultures with female leadership and leadership with people of color," she said in an interview with Marie Claire.
"It's just profoundly overdue. [Women and the public] think, 'Well, I don't know how I can really effect change.' You can effect change by where you spend your money. We all need to be more aware of the companies we work at and the companies that we do business with, because the consumer is very powerful in this world of social media. Some companies are doing incredibly well with inclusion and diversity—those industries thrive, and abuse goes down when you have more balance at the top."
Witherspoon has been working to deliver that gender equality on camera by lending her time to projects that depict the full scope of female existence while simultaneously getting fellow female colleagues involved. She's starred in and produced the female-focused Wild and Big Little Lies HBO series and has a handful of projects down the pipeline, including an upcoming series with Jennifer Aniston and a film she's co-producing with Zendaya.
"I'm excited about the project with Jen Aniston [one of the first television shows out of Apple]. It's a show about women in media—the morning news in particular," she explained to the magazine. "Zendaya and I are producing a movie on a book I brought to her called The Gilded Years. It's about the first African-American woman who graduated from Vassar. It's important to go back in time so that my daughter's generation and Zendaya's generation realize that these were hard-fought wins for humankind and that the brave people at the center of them were women and people of color."
Still, the industry has been far from forgiving for female-focused projects that underperformed by certain standards at the box office. According to Witherspoon, art should not be ruled by price alone.
"It shouldn't just be about financial success. We should have as many opportunities to fail as we do succeed," she told the magazine. "Because artistry is not about succeeding always. It's about having the courage to try and put out into the world new ideas."
Much like the young female character at the center of the highly anticipated A Wrinkle in Time, which Witherspoon will also star in, she has discovered her larger mission.
"I thought I was Meg Murry. I didn't really know where I fit it in the world. I knew there were bigger ideas than the place I lived, and it gave me this idea that I could accomplish things or that that I could be part of a bigger story," she told the magazine.
No matter what fear arises along that bigger story, the star knows she always has someone to count on—herself.
"I see [fear] as this little creature that lives in my life all the time, and I can either pay it attention and not get anything done or I can march ahead and ignore it," she explained. "Sometimes I just have to jump two feet into a cold pool and go, 'OK, I believe in myself enough, I know I work hard. I know I can always bet on myself.'"
Read the full interview in Marie Claire's March issue on newsstands February 20.