Reese Witherspoon is always going to remain humble because she knows where she comes from! 

The actress and producer recently shared an Instagram video, reminiscing about making her first feature film at 14 (1991’s The Man in the Moon). In the movie, she starred as Dani Trant, a young tomboy, coming of age in Louisiana in the summer of 1957. Perfect, right?! 

It was her official film debut. 

“When I was little, I really wanted to be an actor, which was kind of weird because my mom and dad were both in the medical industry,” she said in the video. “So when I was 7 years old, I got to be in a local flower commercial. My best friend down the street, her grandma had a flower shop, so I got in this little flower commercial, and I loved it so, I said to my mom ‘I really want to take acting classes.’ And she signed me up. I would do acting classes every Saturday for three or four hours.”

After seeing an ad in her local paper looking for a 14-year-old Southern girl to appear in a movie, Reese auditioned but didn’t hear anything for a month. 

“I came home from softball practice and my mom said, ‘Reese, I need to talk to you, they’re calling and asking if you’ll go to Los Angeles for a screen test.’ I’ll never forget my mom said to the people on the phone, ‘What kind of movie is this anyway?’ I think she wanted to make sure I wasn’t in like a dirty movie or something. Good job, mom,” she recalls in the video.

Her trip to L.A. was amazing. Then, she had to fly to Louisiana for another round of auditions with the director. 

“I remember I was feeling really nervous and the director was this really amazing man, Robert Mulligan, he said, ‘Why don’t you chew gum? You just sound different and you act different when you’re chewing gum,’” she remembers. “He’d make me spit it out right before I did the scene, but I had to remember how I did it when I was chewing the gum because he wanted me to kind of throw all my words away or something like that.”

Ultimately, Reese got the job and spent the entire summer before her freshman year of high school making the film. 

“I learned everything I needed to know about being a film actor, how to hit marks, how to perform for a camera, how to get emotional,” she says, adding that she also had her first onscreen kiss. 

“I had to kiss a boy onscreen for the first time, and I was 14 years old and I was so embarrassed,” she says. “And I had to do a scene where I was supposed to be skinny dipping, and they had a nude double for me and that was so mortifying when I was 14. Even though I wasn’t doing it.”

LOL! We’re always going to love you, Reese. Thanks for the beautiful throwback. Watch the video below: