Aline Brosh McKenna’s (The Devil Wears Prada) cross-country Netflix romantic comedy isn’t likely to succeed due to the leads’ absence of sparks, but it’s got a weird appeal.
The role of the actresses in Your Place or Mine seems to bring Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon back to their high school days because the producer Aline Brosh McKenna has given the two actors a few assignments prior to filming. The writer and director has handed the two stars books to prepare them to play their parts.
McKenna recently had an interview on Entertainment Weekly, and she disclosed she believed that Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon required a lot of books that be in line with the viewpoint of the characters. She explained “I gave Ashton books that I thought Peter would have and would have read and have a point of view on.”
She went on to say, “With Reese, I gave her a bunch of books that I felt like Debbie had collected over the years — some first editions, some beat-up paperbacks. One of them had an inscription to someone named Peter, so I decided that was Peter’s book that she had kept when he moved.”
Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon Had Totally Different Reactions to the Director’s Assignments
Ashton Kutcher is a self-confessed model student. He also revealed that he wasn’t interested in reading fiction He seized the occasion to give them a go. He explained, “I’m not a very big fiction reader, I don’t read a lot of fiction. And Aline is like, ‘Yeah, but this character’s a novelist, so he’s going to be very well-read in fiction.’ So, I ended up diving in. Aline sent me 10 books prior to the film. She’s like, ‘You need to read all of these.’ And every one of the books had notecards in them about what Peter got from this book, specifically, what he got as a writer from this book.”
The actor was impressed by the director’s job and came across his top book. He stated, “[My favorite was] When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi …. That book was devastatingly wonderful. High Fidelity was very good. I read all of them. I read all 10 books. I actually fell in love with reading fiction again from this experience. That was fun and refreshing.”
While Kutcher viewed the task as an opportunity to make a statement, Reese Witherspoon didn’t like the idea. The actress was not as enthusiastic about the assignment , saying, “Aline also sent me 25 books and I did not read any of them. I called her, and I said, ‘I have three children. I’m running a company, and I have a full-time other job. I’m not reading these books. But they would look really good on the set.’ And they did.”
