Reese Witherspoon says she didn’t understand being gay until she moved to LA

Reese Witherspoon admits that she had no idea what being gay was while growing up in Nashville, Tennessee.

“No one spoke to me abut sexuality when I was a teenager,” the 44-year-old actress revealed during a conversation with Regina King for Variety. “I didn’t understand what homosexuality was. My grandparents didn’t explain it; my parents didn’t explain it.”

“I had to learn [about it] from somebody I met on an audition in Los Angeles,” she added.

The Oscar winner reflected on her Southern upbringing when she appeared on Chelsea Handler’s show in 2006.

“I grew up, obviously, in the South and there is amazing, wonderful connectivity and people are loving and communitive,” Witherspoon said. “But there is a tiny aspect of it, people [that] use parts of the Bible in order to express their intolerance and their hate and they manipulate it.”

Currently, the actress and producer can be seen in the Hulu series “Little Fires Everywhere.” She told Variety the show “incorporated some of the conversation I had with my grandmother” after Witherspoon’s move to LA into her character Elena Richardson’s lines.

“She said: ‘Homosexuality is very rare, Reese. That’s not a thing that happens very often.’ And we put it in the script,” Witherspoon said.