Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher On The Books And Music That Influenced Their Characters In Netflix’s Your Place Or Mine
It’s no surprise that rom-com queen Reese Witherspoon is an avid reader. Under her woman-focused media company Hello Sunshine, she launched a curated book club called Reese’s Book Club to highlight women’s stories — and even turn them into movies and TV shows. They’ve been the team behind bringing so many of our favorite book adaptations to life, including Little Fires Everywhere, Where the Crawdads Sing, Something From Tiffanys, From Scratch, and the upcoming shows Daisy Jones and the Six and The Last Thing He Told Me. They’re even producing Your Place or Mine, which isn’t based on a book but is centered around two characters who are book lovers.
Witherspoon produces and stars in the new Netflix romantic comedy alongside Ashton Kutcher. They play Debbie and Peter, two best friends who are total opposites (aside from their love of books!). When they swap houses and lives for a week they discover what they think they want might not be what they really need. At the Your Place or Mine press conference, Witherspoon, Kutcher, and director/writer Aline Brosh McKenna open up about the books and music that inform these characters.
McKenna gave the actors books to read that would reflect their character’s journeys and motivations. While Kutcher wasn’t a big fiction reader, she knew his character — a novelist — would be very well-read in fiction. “Aline sent me, I think, like 10 books prior to the film. She’s like, ‘You need to read all of these.’ And every one of the books had note cards in them about what Peter fot from this book, specifically. What he got as a writer from this book,” said Kutcher, calling When Breath Becomes Air and High Fidelity his favorites. “I read every single one of them.”
“I actually fell in love with reading fiction again from this experience, So that was fun and refreshing,” he shared. Meanwhile Witherspoon revealed that she was sent 25 vintage books — and didn’t 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,” she laughed. “But they would love really good on the set, and they did.”
In addition to their mutual love of books, both characters have music soundtracks that really reflect them, with Debbie having a special original song called “Embers” co-written by McKenna. “We used The Cars as Peter’s music — the band The Cars that I had grown up on — but also I noticed that men tend to pick a band or an artist that they love and then really stick to that. And for [Debbie], we had a bunch of female singer/songwriter-type artists for her, but we wanted a song that was hers. I was lucky enough that Siddhartha Khosla, who did the composing, and Alan DeMoss, who works with him, invited me in to write a song with them,” she said. “It was really fun and we spent hours on the phone. I told them stories about why I had written the movie and some of the experiences that had led me to write it and what my inspirations were. We talked a lot and then we came up with this idea of embers. That it's a relationship that is not in flames at the moment, but it’s still there and it just needs to be stoked.”
When it came to working with the group Tiny Habits, McKenna reveals she found them on TikTok! “I was on TikTok and I found this young group of artists from the Berklee School of Music and they sing a cappella a lot,” she shared. “We did the arrangement with them and I think it came out to be a really cool song that sort of represents Debbie’s hope for re-igniting.”
Stoking the flames can be a bit difficult for Debbie and Pete’s “will they, won’t they” romance as they deal with the complication of spending most of the movie in separate cities. “When we’re in a scene together, and we’re both there, we’re very improv-y with one another,” said Kutcher. “But given the way that this was shot, one side of the coverage was done before the other person even began to shoot their side. We were acting against a video of each other and the choices [they had] already made.”
Your Place or Mine hits Netflix on February 10 — just in time for Valentine’s Day.
