Kelly Clarkson Hilariously Forgets ‘The Notebook’ In Book Trivia vs. Reese Witherspoon

Kelly Clarkson Hilariously Forgets ‘The Notebook’ In Book Trivia vs. Reese Witherspoon

I’m jumping right in. Is this your first time to work together? Yes, it is. Yeah. Yeah. What a productive little number this is. Okay. So, did you find that you had a lot in common while working together? Because I imagine you have to have some kind of chemistry when you’re writing a novel. Yeah. I mean, I think we kind of daydream in the same ways, but he has um he writes thrillers and really dark mysteries. So, I think about characters a lot and then he comes up with like sinister plot devices. A little nervous alone with me. I think sometimes like where did you come up with that thing? Oh my god, that’s what I do when I’m in watching a movie or reading a book. I’m like what kind of messed up individual I’m like and ta. Um, but wait, is it true that you wanted to be a country singer? Because I do find that I really did you kind of were Well, I got to be in an once. That was kind of fabulous. not only get to be in a you played like one of the most classic singer songwriters ever, Jim Carter Catch. That was incredible. Thank you. Yeah, that’s cool to have that dream when you’re a kid and then like it didn’t maybe happen how you thought, but then it ended up happening in a different way. Yeah. I was that kid who wanted to be an actor and a singer and a dancer and I wanted to be a country music singer. So, I went to acting camps, which was kind of funny, and they said, “Um, you can cool it on the singing, and when you dance, we’re going to put you in the back, but yeah, for the acting part, you’re that’s your thing.” So, that’s how I learned at at 13 to kind of concentrate on acting. Did you receive that well? I would not have received that well. Um, no. Well, at least I said I was good at something. Like, oh, you’re an optimist. I was bad at everything. I was so depressed. But I did train to be a country singer. I trained for two years and I thought it was so fun. Yeah. Well, it worked out in some way. It did. That was pretty cool. I always found it funny because you haven’t won a Grammy and I thought you had won a Grammy for that soundtrack. I Well, yeah. The the soundtrack won the Grammy, but I didn’t win. I know. But you didn’t get one for that soundtrack because you’re the singer on it. That’s correct. I’m one of the singers. Okay. You know, Phoenix played Johnny Cash in the movie and he was on Yeah. I like that you’re mad for her though. That’s I am. I was mad because I was like how’s she not cuz you’ve won everything else. You could be an e guy by now. Not that it matters, but I just meant like I thought that you had for sure. So funny that you say that cuz your kids kind of like my youngest kid is super invested in my career. My other two give two craps, but my youngest is like, “Mom, can you get an EGOT?” And I was like, “Well, I’m going to have to work a lot harder.” And he’s like, “Well, then get going. What do we need to do?” He wants me to win a Tony so bad. And I’m like, “Do you know where a Tony is?” He was like, “No, you could do it.” Yeah. Which way to play after? We’re going to play. We’re going to be in a play. Okay. It could be really dark and scare the out of us. There you go. You could sing in it. Um, so wait, speaking of acting, so the morning show is back. What’s What’s happening? Oh my gosh, you guys. It’s madness. All the characters are getting together. All of them. Like there isn’t a character that isn’t getting together with another character. At least someone is. Way to go. Yeah. Season four, we know everybody. Um there’s a lot of talk about AI and deep fakes, which is real, very real, you know, and it’s something Jennifer Anston and I have been kind of talking about personally too because there’s a lot of deep fakes of actors now telling you to buy a product or do this thing online and it’s completely fake and there’s a lot of people who don’t know the difference. I like though that it is kind of cool and a really great way to sneakily have really good messaging in your show that it is based on real events that have happened and it’s kind of inspired by that. Do you do that with writing? Do you ever pull from your real life? Yeah, everything that happens in real life is fodder. I mean, it makes it more interesting for people. It’s something to do a lot of research, but this is our lives, right? If you’re going on a date with somebody, you’re googling their name. Anyone who doesn’t, it’s just not realistic. So, you have to do whatever technology is going No, don’t Google anyone, but you have to do that. Otherwise, it’s not really realistic. It’s fun. Their new book is called Gone Before Goodbye. It’s out now. I want to talk about the incredible success Reese has had with her company, Hello Sunshine, and what that’s meant for women um as a whole. And so, we need to go back a little to do that. So, you realized something. It was after your Oscar win, right? What? Tell everybody what kind of hit you. So kind of when I was about 34, I started looking around just not seeing parts for women that I wanted to play and then hearing that certain friends of mine were like thinking about doing parts that were no good. And I was just thought I got to do better. So that’s when I really got involved in the book world and started optioning different books that I like to turn them into movies. And I started with Gone Girl and Wild and like wildly successful. Yeah. And then we did Big Little Lies. And so those were like our first three. Yeah. Yeah. And um it just kept rolling from there. So we pick a book every month for um my book club. And that’s when I started actually meeting authors and that’s actually about nine years ago is when I met Haron at a conference with all these authors and he came right up to me and he goes, “I really like what you’re doing at Hello Sunshine and I have two daughters and my wife is amazing and I just think it’s amazing what you’re doing for storytelling for women.” Yeah. And that’s incredible. It’s true. She’s getting she’s getting people to read. I’ve read every one of the books that she And then if you read one, you start reading more. Reading is contagious. Yeah. And that’s a wonderful thing. And Reese’s has really been promoting that. There’s a line though um that you always saw women saying in film that you hated. What is the line? This is funny. What do we do now? There’s always there’s always a like growing up and even watching movies as I was making them and watching like there was always a part where the girl would turn to the guy at the moment of crisis and go what do we do now? Yeah. And I did a whole speech about it because I don’t know a woman who would turn to a man Yeah. during and be like, “What do we do now? I’m so confused. This is what we’re going to do first, then we’re going to do that, and you’re going to follow me. Well, I also think that that’s important why you’re like like the the whole female the thing. You’re like, there’s the lack of female representation. Well, because there’s a lack of female writers doing it or directors or there’s just a lack like you know of that happening. So, I think that’s why if somebody doesn’t know, it’s getting a lot lot better. I think as people start realizing it and audience actually starts watching these things are created by women or pay more attention it’s getting better. Well honest I’m not trying to toot your horn but I think Hello Sunshine is a big reason why I think companies like that it’s a big reason why if you don’t see what you want to play make it like make it happen like you know I think that’s a really important step. Don’t you think there’s a point in your life where you have to kind of take ownership of your talent or your career or wherever you’re at and go, “Okay, I’m not the kid in the room anymore. I got to be the grown-up and I got to help steer this shit.” Responsibility. Yeah. A different kind of responsibility. He’s just going to keep running. It scares us. I know. Wait, he makes like seven television shows a year. They’re all so successful. He’s got food in his pantry. You’re doing all right. Um, so wait, so you you come from a family of really strong women, right? came up. Yeah. My actually my mother, this is this is going back to the 70s. She had a bumper sticker on her car. Think about this for a moment. That said, women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition. I love your mom. That’s a great mother. Yeah. So, yeah, my wife is a pediatrician. My my daughter writes her own TV shows also. I don’t really know the women that say I’ve never met a woman who ever asked me once, “What do we do now?” Never. Not once. in all of my life. I’ve asked plenty of times, but never once gone the other way. Yeah, that’s amazing though to grow up in with such powerful like female strength around. That’s awesome. Well, explain the new book and the main character developing that. Oh gosh. Okay. Well, I had this idea for a character. I was learning a lot about the world of private surgeons. Do you know about this? No. So, there’s surgeons that are hired, American surgeons are hired to go to foreign countries to perform surgery on high netw worth individuals all over the world. It happens all the time. And we’re talking not just like plastic surgery or but like liver transplants and kidney transplants and things like that. So I got really interested in that as a character and I was like why can’t it be a woman you know? So um my character my character like I’m in it. The character that I kept thinking about was this girl Maggie McCabe and she’s a former military surgeon and she’s in reconstructive surgery but she’s really down on her luck. She’s lost her medical license for a lot of reasons and she gets this crazy opportunity and that is that’s the pitch that I took to Harlon. She gets this opportunity to go to another country to perform surgery on a very rich man and his girlfriend. And then she gets stuck in this crazy world of wealth and corruption. And so I pitched it to Harland. They said, “Ooh, yeah, that’s good.” And he was like, “Ooh, they did it for me.” He’s like, but then he started coming up with new ideas and I was like, “Yes, yeah, that’s perfect.” And I was like, but he didn’t know that was all I had. You were like, “So, go.” Yeah. He was like, we literally were sitting there and my apartment and I was a little bit like a little wary. I don’t I don’t really collaborate on novels, TV, but and all of a sudden she tells me like, “Oh, dang. That’s good.” And all of a sudden, I have a yellow legal pad out and we spend three hours and we’re going like this and we throwing ideas out. And at the end, we just sort of said to each other, “Why don’t we try to write this as a novel together?” Yeah. And uh we did. And we did. And we’re we’re thrilled. We can’t wait. Is it good? I mean, I imagine it’s like songwriting. It’s like sometimes songwriters get in a room and it just the chemistry isn’t there. But sometimes when you get in a room, you’re like, “Whoa.” Like the worlds collide and it actually works. Yeah. That was what it was like. Yeah. It really was. I mean, whoa. We were we texted every day. We were emailing. We’re talking on the phone. You know, I know when Reese isn’t sleeping well because I’ll wake up to some article or an idea that she had or a paragraph she wrote at night or whatever or I don’t know where you are in the world sometimes like why did this come in at 3 in the morning. Yeah. So, and that’s how we did it. We just went back and forth and we met every time that we were in the same city and I think we were both became completely obsessed with Gone Before Goodbye. It’s all you know we were sleeping, eating, thinking about it. We really wanted it to be our best work. So, we’re you know Yeah, absolutely. Welcome back. Reese Witherspoon and Harley Coven are here with us. Their new book is called Gone Before Goodbye. You can find it wherever you buy your books. In honor of that book and all great novels in our lives, it is time for a game we are calling poetic plots. [Music] Oh my god, Melody. Um Harlon has been kind enough to agree to host this game. So take it away, Haron. Thank you, Kelly. I didn’t necessarily agree to it, but I want to have to face YouTube to his competition. That’s the whole thing. In this game, I’ll read some plot points from famous novels. I’ll read these in rhyming verse. The first to hit their button and name the correct novel gets the point. But if you buzz in too early and you’re wrong, you cannot guess again and your opponent will get to hear the end of the clue. So, let’s be careful. That’s how you’re going to win. There we go. The winner will earn a prize for her side of the audience. Kelly is playing for everyone near the band. Yeah, Reese Pressure. Reese is playing for the rest. All right. So, here we go. Okay. Question one. You guys ready? No. A scholarly invite arrives via post was sent to a boy. Wow. Harry Potter. That’s correct. Harry Potter. Oh, I might be good at this. Okay, good. Okay. I thought y’all were going to go toll story with this. So, that’s why I thought I was gonna I was like, I can do this. Okay. All right. Here we go, guys. You ready? Yes. A small southern town. The story was set. mysterious neighbor whom scout to kill a mocking bird to kill a mocking bird. I didn’t even nope. Wow. I think we’ve established the difference between me and Reese Witherspoon. Harry Potter and Tequila. All right, we are on question three. Okay, both have gotten one question right. This is so suspenseful. Write a novel about this. A lonely young girl whose family ignores the gifts she possesses. Matilda. Wow. My favorite book. It’s my favorite child. That’s such a good That’s my favorite childhood book. I’m looking at the answer and I didn’t get it that fast. Roll doll is once again roll doll tolly. Okay, here we go. Question four. A dystopian state. The outlook is bleak. Oh, wow. I’m gonna go Hunger Games. Hunger Games. [Applause] Wow. I actually love that book and I didn’t get it from that. This is two to two. That buzzer means we only have one question left. Tiebreaker. Here we go, folks. It is all tied. The suspense is killing everybody. Here we go. in South Carolina. He worked at a mill, fell deeply in love with a woman, but still her family forbade it cuz he was so poor. That’s Noah. That’s um That’s Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. It’s the Oh my god. It’s Noah. There is Noah. It’s Adams is the girl. Yes. Um Oh my god. James Garner. I’m like I know the whole movie. Um it’s Oh my god. Anything? Oh my god. Is not correct. Oh my god. I can’t remember the title. I know you know what it is. Greenbone. Oh my god. Oh my god. [Applause] I just listed like every freaking actor in it. I can’t. Oh my god. Fine. I’m so happy for you. It was close. You were so close. There’s nothing there. But I can still go on about how awesome that dystopian number was. Like, okay. Okay. Well, I’m a loser, but y’all are still a winner. There you go. So, you’re all getting a digital download copy of the Dawn Before Goodbye audio book. Dawn Before Goodbye is available in sports number one right now. Go get it. Everybody give it up for Reese Witherspoon and Harman. You can also see Reese in new episodes of the Morning Show Wednesdays on Apple TV Plus. [Music] [Applause]

Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben team up for the first time with their new thriller novel “Gone Before Forgotten,” about a private surgeon who gets caught up in a deadly conspiracy. Reese reflects on her journey through the book world with her company Hello Sunshine, and shares how her obsession with developing character fit perfectly with Harlan’s knack for sinister plot devices. Reese also takes on Kelly in a book trivia game hosted by Harlan, which takes a hilarious turn!

0:00 – Reese Witherspoon’s Country Singer Dream
2:54 – The Morning Show Season 4
4:07 – The Success Of Hello Sunshine
7:26 – Coming From Powerful Women
8:07 – New Novel “Gone Before Goodbye”
10:50 – Poetic Plots: The Ultimate Novel Trivia

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