Losing 'Gone Girl' role was an 'ego check', says Reese Witherspoon

Hollywood star Reese Witherspoon talked about her exit from the 2014 thriller film ‘Gone Girl’, which eventually went to actress Rosamund Pike.

Witherspoon opened up about the film while it was in development. At the time, Witherspoon had been attached to star in the adaptation as Amy Elliott Dunne, receiving approval from author Gillian Flynn and shepherding the project through her production company. However, once director David Fincher came aboard, he decided against casting her in the role, reported ‘variety.com’.

“David sat me down - and this isn’t on David - but David’s like, ‘You’re totally wrong for this part and I’m not putting you in it’,” Reese said on the ‘Las Culturistas’ podcast. She added, “I had all these conversations with the writer Gillian Flynn and she was like, ‘No, I’d really like you to do it’. But Fincher was like, ‘You’re wrong’.”

The thriller, which also stars Ben Affleck, proved a breakthrough for Pike, who scored her first Academy Award nomination for the film, landing a nod for ‘Best Actress’.

“That was, first of all, an ego check for me. It was like, ‘No, you’re not right for everything’. And he was right. He was totally right. Fincher just killed it. Rosamund Pike is so diabolical and Ben Affleck is sort of the rube on the other side of it,” Witherspoon recalled about her conversation with Fincher.

‘Gone Girl’ revolves around Nick Dunne, who discovers that the entire media focus has shifted on him when his wife, Amy Dunne, mysteriously disappears on the day of their fifth wedding anniversary.

Witherspoon ended up scoring a best actress Oscar nomination that same year anyway, leading the biopic ‘Wild’ from her soon-to-be ‘Big Little Lies’ director Jean-Marc Vallée. She produced both ‘Wild’ and ‘Gone Girl’. Now, she is starring in the fourth season of ‘The Morning Show’.