Lauren Neustadter and Reese Witherspoon are having a big summer, with back-to-back high-profile releases: July’s debuts of “Legally Blonde” prequel series “Elle” on Amazon’s Prime Video and the Anya Taylor-Joy-led action miniseries “Lucky” at Apple TV.
Premiering just two weeks apart, both shows are produced by Witherspoon’s media company, Hello Sunshine, which is coming up on its 10th anniversary this fall. And up next, the production company behind “Daisy Jones & the Six” and “Where the Crawdads Sing” has HBO’s “Big Little Lies” Season 3, the release of Sony Pictures’ “The Nightingale,” starring Dakota Fanning and Elle Fanning, and the second season of “Elle” (which has already wrapped filming) to look forward to in 2027.
It’s a packed slate that’s the culmination of nearly a decade of work from Witherspoon and the Hello Sunshine team, which is led by president and head of TV and film Neustadter.
“At the very beginning, a part of the mission was to create opportunities for women to shine, and creating opportunities for them to shine in front of the camera, behind the camera, as members of our team,” Neustadter tells Variety. “It was all equally important to us, and it was really a core part of the mission of Hello Sunshine when we talked about, ‘What do we want this company to be?’ Whether it’s scripts or books, whether it’s as directors, whether it’s as heads of department on our production.”
From “The Morning Show” to “Little Fires Everywhere,” Neustadter says she and Witherspoon have been focused on finding “exactly the right people to bring these projects to life,” including Jonathan Tropper for “Lucky” and “Elle” showrunners Laura Kittrell and Caroline Dries.
Neustadter says this partner-focused strategy has led to success for Hello Sunshine, as well as prepared the team for even bigger projects ahead, including the return of “Big Little Lies,” which premiered back in 2017.
“The reality is, Hello Sunshine didn’t exist when the first season of ‘Big Little Lies’ was made. That was Reese and Bruna [Papandrea] and Pacific Standard and David E. Kelley, and they did the most amazing job ever,” Neustadter says. “And we were privileged to be invited in for the second season, and also for the third. It is the most inspired and inspiring team, and I think there are so many things about that show that are extraordinary and special. And one of them is it is a true team effort.”
The third season of “Big Little Lies” will be based on author Liane Moriarity’s upcoming sequel book, “Big Little Truths,” and features the returns of Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley and Laura Dern, among others.
“HBO is the most amazing partner alongside this incredible producing team, and I think we all care so much about every single one of these amazing characters,” Neustadter says. “So just being in the conversation and thinking about what this next chapter looks like for these extraordinary women in Monterey, it’s a privilege. But it is truly, truly a team effort and I know Season 3 is going to be incredible.”
Read more from Variety‘s deep-dive interview with Neustadter below.
One of the things that we try to do with every single project is make sure that everyone involved loves it like we love it. “Big Little Lies” is an incredible example of that, because I think everyone cares incredibly deeply about these characters. And so we are 100% immersed in the book, and in thoughtful conversation about the adaptation and about the characters. You also have the gift of having actresses who know and love and have lived these characters, who are in the conversation about how you’re taking it from book to screen, which is always such an amazing privilege. I think it just makes the material so very rich. So I’m very excited about everything that’s happening and all the conversations that are going on.
We are excited about “Big Little Lies.” I’m hoping that we’ll be in production on a third season of “Elle,” and the second season of “Elle” will come out. The fifth season of “The Morning Show” will come out. “The Nightingale” will come out, and then we have a couple of other movies that we’re gearing up on that will hopefully be in production in ’27. So it should be busy.
It feels like with the landscape of each of these episodes you’re with her as she’s on the run. You’re seeing her as a chameleon in a way that I think is so fascinating and intriguing, and actually quite singular in a limited series like this. We fell in love with this book, and really, really with this character, and also with the complicated relationship that she had with her father.
We always love to stretch. We always love to go into an area that we haven’t been in before, and explore, and be curious, and bring these characters to life, but also team up with people who have very specific superpowers. So Jonathan Tropper was that person. He’s a person that we admired greatly, both as a screenwriter and as an author. He can do this full-throttle action in a way that, quite frankly, was new to us. So we knew that we needed an expert in that field to come in and architect these badass sequences and think really big about what this could be. It was incredibly important to us, to Hello Sunshine, to the [future] readers of the book, that it would be right because the book had not yet published. We needed to protect the heart and soul and the vulnerability of this character, and so we needed a creator of the series that was going to do both.
Even at the end, when we’re sitting in the mix and you’re calibrating sound, and I’m thinking about, how is Lucky breathing? And how are we emotionally with her? And Jonathan is like, “Can we make the gunshot a little louder? This explosion, I want to really feel it.” And it was just awesome. And when I think about “Daisy Jones & the Six,” it was similar on the music side.
It’s everything that I hoped for. I feel like women are just coming up to me and saying thank you for making a joyful show. And of the things that Reese really acutely felt was that, particularly for a younger generation of women, the messaging they were receiving on social media was not necessarily telling them they were wonderful and perfect just the way they are and capable of anything they dreamed of. I think, without being treacly, “Elle” really reminds us that we’re good enough, and it’s OK to be different. And I think Elle herself embodies that. I also think [her mother] Eva [played by June Diane Raphael] really embodies that.
One of the things that I love, and it’s been lovely and wonderful to see the response to Eva’s character, who we architected very intentionally as a character that was a bit of a love letter to those of us that saw the movie in the theaters when it came out, and now are in a different phase of our lives. And I think Eva is, for us, a woman who is grappling with a different set of issues and asking questions about identity when she’s in her 40s and she’s moving to a different place.
One of the things that we’re always trying to do is connect with women and reflect their lived experience. And hopefully “Elle” does that in a joyful way. In a way, I think it’s a show that women can relax and enjoy. We just wanted to give the audience and the fans of “Legally Blonde” something delicious and something that they could connect to. And I hope we’ve done it. A person that I went to high school with, who’s now living in North Carolina, texted and said, “My daughter is obsessed with the show, and we’re savoring it, and we’re watching one episode every night together.”
We wrapped Season 2 before we had our press and premiere around Season 1. And a lot of that, to be very honest with you, had to do with weather, because one of the things that was challenging was there was a lot of sunshine in Season 1, and we needed to calibrate that with visual effects. And we were really trying to feel Seattle. And we recognized that if we waited a typical period, we would be looking at a summer start, and so then it’s going to be glorious. You’re not going to get the gloomy skies. You’re not going to get the rain. You’re not going to get the elements. So one, it’s a testament to Amazon’s belief in the show and enthusiasm, and as they were seeing cuts, I think they were feeling really excited.
And we figured, let’s go, let’s keep this momentum up. We knew that we wanted to do each season as a semester for “Elle,” so we’re starting with the first semester of her junior year, and then we’re rolling right into the second. It made a lot of sense in terms of story and momentum to continue. I think the show really benefited from not having a huge amount of downtime. I think emotionally, everybody was very connected to where their character was at the end of Season 1 as we go into Season 2.
We love to be busy. It’s something that we have in common, and also we just have the most amazing team. I admire so many things about Reese, but one of the things that I admire most is she’s very intentional about hiring people who are excellent at what they do, and then trusting them to do their jobs. So she’s an amazing partner. She is certainly involved in everything. She’s reading all the books. She’s reading all the scripts. She’s watching all the cuts. She’s giving us her thoughts.
At the same time, if we are moving at a fast clip, I will touch base with her and say, I want to let you know this is what’s going on and I feel great about it, and she’s like, “I feel great about it too,” and we go. Particularly, in a moment like this, she’s starring in “The Morning Show,” and we’re launching two shows, and we’re optioning a new book that we’re so excited about. We are trying to juggle all of these things elegantly. And I think trust is a very important piece of it. I will say, an equally important piece of it is having an unbelievable team. We have people who’ve started off as assistants who are now running sets. They help us to make it all happen, and it’s so exciting just to think about everything that we’ve accomplished in the past decade or so.