No more Ms Nice Gal

All of which came in handy when Witherspoon embarked on a career revamp a few years ago. That was when the actress who immortalised Elle Woods, won an Oscar for playing June Carter Cash and cornered the Hollywood market for sunny self-possessed blondes with a lot going on upstairs, found herself facing scant roles.

“Other than one studio, nobody was developing anything with a female lead,” Witherspoon, 38, said. “It just hit me like a tonne of bricks. And then I thought: ‘Why don’t I do something about it?’.”

So, in 2012, with Australian producer Bruna Papandrea, Witherspoon started a production company, Pacific Standard, that has burst from the starting gate with two of the most highly buzzed about films of the year. Each is based on a bestseller that Reese optioned after tearing through the galleys more or less overnight.

The first, Gone Girl, from the novel by Gillian Flynn and starring Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck, has earned more than $200 million worldwide since its release. The second, Wild, based on the memoir by Cheryl Strayed, adapted by Hornby and set for release in December, has some prognosticators forecasting an Oscar nod for Witherspoon.

“I’m ecstatic,” she said, “that they both turned out as well as they did.”

Playing Strayed has slingshot Witherspoon further from the rom-com ghetto that she began escaping around three years ago, after starring in three low-buzz love-triangle films. Making “a conscious effort to redirect”, she took a small role as the hard-bitten Juniper in the lauded 2013 Southern gothic indie Mud. Other against-type characters followed: a harried social worker aiding Sudanese refugees in The Good Lie, which opened last month, and a world-weary district attorney in Paul Thomas Anderson’s trippy ensemble piece Inherent Vice.

But it is her work in Wild that has entertainment writers bandying about the dreaded C-word: comeback.

“She was in a place in herself like: ‘I’m going to change your perception. I’m going to get out of my comfort zone’,” said Jean-Marc Vallée, who directed Wild, as well as last year’s award-winning Dallas Buyers Club.

In Wild, broken by the death of her adored mother, Witherspoon’s character embarks on a gruelling 1,100-mile trek of the Pacific Crest Trail, with flashbacks to her rampant philandering, which torpedoed her marriage, and her heroin use. Along with filming scenes of rough sex and drug use, she said, during production she also toppled into frigid water under a 70-pound backpack and fended off mosquitoes and snakes. Still, Vallée said he was struck by how effortless she made acting seem.

“Reese has a way of — bang — nailing it,” Vallée said. “You wonder, ‘We were just talking about tacos and burgers’. And you call, ‘Three, two, one, action’, and a second later, her eyes are all teary. And five minutes later, you go, ‘Cut’, and she’s talking about mustard on the burger.”

Apparent ease aside, Witherspoon has described the role as her most difficult. She said the role also brought relief, after decades of being cast and typecast, willingly and not, as America’s sweetheart.

“I’ve sat through millions of development meetings where people are like: ‘We don’t want Reese to say profanity. We don’t want her to have sex. We don’t want her to take drugs’,” Witherspoon said. “I didn’t really feel the constraints of it until about three years ago. I’m a complex person. But somehow, I have this reductive experience where I’m put into this tiny little box.”

And what box would that be?

“Likable,” Witherspoon said with a hint of disdain. “And what is likable? To me, likable is human and honest. To me, I find the character in Wild much more likable than a lot of characters I’ve played in comedy. She’s telling the truth. She’s not ashamed of the sexual experiences she’s had or her drug use.”

Gone Girl is a smash and Wild a film festival success. But the hope with Wild is that a tale of a woman who surmounts financial woes, drug problems and grief by herself will resonate with men and women alike.