Much has been made of just how identical Reese Witherspoon and her daughter Ava Phillippe appear, but the actor recently confessed that neither one of them really gets the comparison.
The Big Little Lies star made an appearance on Today with Hoda & Jenna on Tuesday to discuss parenting and address the popular opinion that her daughter is her doppelgänger. During their conversation about parenting young adults, the actress shared a photo of Phillippe, prompting host Jenna Bush Hager to exclaim, “Wait, y’all are twins!” But Witherspoon replied, “She and I don’t see it that much.”
The actor shares two children with her ex-husband Ryan Phillippe, 23-year-old Ava and an 18-year-old son, Deacon. She also has a 10-year-old son, Tennessee Toth, with her current husband, Jim Toth.
Witherspoon told hosts Hager and Hoda Kotb that having kids at such wildly different points in her life meant adapting her parenting style to better suit each child. “You establish a different relationship,” she explained. “First of all, you’re managing them a lot when they’re little, and it’s very physical. And then it’s more emotional support. And suggestions, not telling them what to do when they get a little bit older.”
She continued, “But you have to really nurture your adult relationship with your children too. And give them respect and space to become who they are, not who you want them to be.”
Stefanie Keenan
But while Reese Witherspoon and her daughter may not see the resemblance, plenty of fans certainly do. Especially after the actor shared a photo of the two of them at brunch with her 73-year-old mother Betty last month. The trio also posed for a multi-generational portrait that accompanied Witherspoon’s Vogue cover shoot back in January 2019. And in the interview accompanying the images, the Legally Blonde star recalled being a young mom, bringing her daughter to set with her while making that film, the same way her mother brought her to work when she was a labour and delivery nurse in Nashville, Tennessee’s Vanderbilt hospital.
She told the magazine about going to work with Betty and watching her “take care of seventeen babies at once. There would usually be two women, and they’d be doing all the diapering, all the feeding—everything, all at once.” She added, “And the crying of the babies! The noise! She said she didn’t even hear it. I remember being so in awe of my mom. She always had a positive attitude, always laughing, always telling a joke, and she always had a billion friends at work. She just loved the women she worked with.”
This story was originally published by Vanity Fair.