Despite popular belief, Witherspoon did not meet her future husband Ryan Phillippe on the set of the 1999 film Cruel Intentions. Rather, “I crashed her party,” Philippe explained to the Pennsylvania Morning Call newspaper weeks before receiving the script about attending her 21st birthday party. “I went with a friend because I knew there was going to be free food and drinks. I was just sitting in the corner chugging down drinks when someone came up to me and introduced Reese to me.”
That’s when she took action.
In 1998, she told Jane magazine, “I don’t know what came into my head – maybe it was seven Midori Sours – but I said to him, ‘I think you’re my birthday present.'”
Cruel Intentions director Roger Kumble later recalled to Cosmopolitan that he was “hanging out with Ryan one night” when they started discussing who to cast as his girlfriend.
After some persuasion (“She wanted to strengthen the character, and she was right,” Kumble noted), Witherspoon signed on. The couple married three months after the film’s release, welcomed daughter Eva Phillippe in 1999 and son Deacon Phillippe in 2003, and separated in 2006.
