Reese Witherspoon Says It’s Important to ‘Edit Your Friendships’: ‘Everybody Out There Over 40 Knows’

Reese Witherspoon is getting real about how she maintains friendships in her busy life.

On Friday, the Legally Blonde star, 47, spoke at a conference in Boston and opened up about how she cultivates her inner circle.

“Editing. Edit your friendships,” Witherspoon told NBC News Daily anchor Zinhle Essamuah at HubSpot’s annual INBOUND gathering.

“Everybody out there over 40 knows. If you aren’t adding to my life, get the heck outta my life. My grandma used to say people are radiators or drains. Stick with radiators,” The Morning Show actress added.

When it came to discussing how she has coped with rejection, Witherspoon admitted that she got acquainted with the concept when she was “so young.”

“Rejection was such an early piece of my life that I learned a long time ago that other people’s opinions of me are none of my business. Other people’s opinions of you, and everyone’s gonna have an opinion, doesn’t matter,” she continued.

Witherspoon added that living on her own terms has been freeing.

“I really don’t care what anybody thinks. I’m gonna do my work anyway. I’m gonna date whoever I want, go hang out with a friend nobody likes. When you release that feeling of other people’s opinions crushing you or holding you down, you’re free. You’re totally free,” the Oscar winner said.

In August, Witherspoon settled her divorce with Jim Toth after 12 years of marriage. The former couple shares a son, Tennessee, 10. The Walk the Line actress also shares two children with ex-husband Ryan Phillippe — daughter Ava, 23, and son Deacon, 19.

For Friday’s INBOUND conference, the mission was to “focus on human connection to drive transformative growth, meaningful conversations, and actionable insights.” The event brought “industry-spanning icons, marketing [and] sales leaders, wellness experts, and acclaimed authors” to Boston.

While speaking with Essamuah, Witherspoon opened up about the dearth of female-driven projects in Hollywood, which led her to “put my money where my mouth is” and “actually walk the walk” to launch the production company that became Hello Sunshine.

The media company, founded in 2016, is behind projects such as Daisy Jones & The Six, The Morning Show, Truth Be Told, and From Scratch.

“I was told not to put my own money in it several times by many, many advisors. I saw people who were taking money from studios, and I saw how watered down the product was. I saw that they were sitting on material that never got made,” Witherspoon explained of her decison to personally invest in her production company Hello Sunshine.

She continued, “And I thought if you were to function and do something differently, you have to think about it differently. And you have to capitalize it differently. So probably about a year and we had two of these three Oscar nominations, we had a television show that got done. And I couldn’t keep the lights on.”

Witherspoon credited Toth, 50, for helping to refine her approach.