Xtreme Vogue London Desk: Sarah Marshal
Reese Witherspoon returns to her romantic comedy roots after spending the past six years working largely on dramas. Her latest role is in the Netflix movie Your Place or Mine, a modern love story that flips rom-com tropes by celebrating middle-aged relationships. The Oscar winner and Ashton Kutcher play 40-somethings experiencing the blunders of love in tandem with the realities of middle age.
“Has it really been that long? I didn’t stop on purpose. I don’t think I’ll ever stop making romantic comedies,” Witherspoon told Vanity Fair at the Your Place or Mine premiere in Los Angeles on Thursday evening. “They are very important to me. It’s my favorite genre because it makes people feel good. This one is even more special because we have different voices and different perspectives telling the story. Our movie is about a single mom in her 40s getting second chances and finding love. You often don’t see this in a romantic comedy.”
Your Place or Mine, streaming February 10 on Netflix, is about longtime friends Debbie (Witherspoon) and Peter (Kutcher), whose friendship began with a one-night stand. Twenty years later, Debbie is living in Los Angeles and raising her 13-year-old son, while commitment-phobic Peter is living in a swanky Brooklyn bachelor pad. The two are still extremely close and talk daily over FaceTime. Peter suggests they swap homes for a week so that Debbie can take her final exam in New York for her master’s degree while he watches over her son in LA. This flip-flop leads the pair to come to some major realizations about their feelings for each other.
“Women in their 40s deserve stories too. It’s important to know that life doesn’t stop after 40,” said Witherspoon. “My character has ambition and wants to really feel alive. You don’t have to be in your 20s to feel this, and I think a lot of women feel that way when they’re my age. We want to see something that is very grounded in reality. Even with Ashton’s character, we show the realities of people in their 40s, and this is something that’s never even talked about, and I hope it changes people’s perspective. Our story still has romance and escape, but we are trying to reflect what we see in our everyday lives and see it in movies.”
Kutcher is also making a comeback of sorts in Your Place or Mine after a long absence from the screen. His last starring feature film role was as Steve Jobs in 2013, while his last major TV role was in the Netflix sitcom The Ranch in 2020. During that time away, Kutcher began a second career as a successful tech investor, getting involved early in companies such as Uber, Airbnb, and Spotify. In 2019 he was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune condition that left him unable to see, hear, and walk. It took him a year to recover. Now, he’s acting again—with a new perspective. He appeared in a supporting role in the drama Vengeance last summer and recently reprised his star-making role as Kelso from That ’70s Show in the sitcom’s spin-off, That ’90s Show.
“I don’t think I was really away,” Kutcher said about not appearing onscreen. “My wife [Mila Kunis] is an actress and has a production company and is always in the guts of it. I think I just got very quiet publicly in an effort to really just focus on things I care about, like my family. I think one of the things that I realized during that time is to build solutions to problems that exist in the world for the world. And equally important is telling stories that affect the public discourse and affect the narrative. I love telling stories. I want to be part of companies and projects that say something and deliver joy to people. Your Place or Mine is fun, and I hope it brings happiness for people. It did for me.”
Kutcher said that when he first read the script for Your Place or Mine, he immediately knew he had to take the part. He got “chills” due to the story line mirroring his own personal life.
