Witherspoon is still making comedies; this winter, she'll team with Vince Vaughn on Four Christmases, a Meet the Fockers-style farce about a couple trying to spend the holidays at each of their divorced parents' separate homes. But nowadays she's also steering her career toward genres — and paychecks — nobody would have imagined before she snagged that statuette for Walk the Line. Next year, for instance, she's slated to make her first horror movie, Our Family Trouble, for which she'll reportedly be paid the staggering salary of $29 million. That's more than even Roberts has ever earned.
But for now she's focused on the serious stuff. Part Syriana, part A Mighty Heart, Rendition tackles the controversial practice of extraordinary rendition, in which the U.S. government kidnaps suspected terrorists and flies them to other countries to be tortured for information. ''I read about it when it first [leaked out], and it just seemed there should be a movie about it,'' says co-producer Mark Martin, who admits he was initially ''thinking Cate Blanchett'' for the lead. But Steve Golin (Babel), who would become one of his producing partners, saw Reese in the role right away. ''The movie is about somebody you love disappearing,'' he explains. ''And Reese is such a beloved actress — she's such a girl-next-door type, only more beautiful — it makes what she goes through even more relatable.''
As it happens, Witherspoon is descended from a real-life political rabble-rouser: one of her ancestors was John Witherspoon, the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. But as for her own ideological opinions, even on the subject of extraordinary rendition, not even the most brutal celebrity-interview interrogation techniques can make her talk. ''Actors have this influence — people ask about our clothes and things like that,'' she says. ''I don't want my politics to become part of that. It's personal to me.'' You can guess how chatty she gets when the conversation turns to her divorce from Phillippe (the couple now share custody of their two children, Ava and Deacon). Or what she has to say about those paparazzi shots showing her and Gyllenhaal seemingly getting friendly in a parking lot.
Cue sounds of silverware clinking.
NEXT PAGE: ''To this day, I genuinely don't know if they had a relationship. But I can promise you that Reese and Jake were never together on the set.''
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