Reese Witherspoon Recalls Parking Denzel Washington’s Porsche While Interning on Movie Set as a Teen: “I Stripped All the Gears”

Reese Witherspoon is sharing some memorable interactions with Robert De Niro and Denzel Washington from when she first started in the entertainment industry.

While on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Thursday, the Your Place or Mine star detailed that one of her first auditions was with De Niro and Martin Scorsese for the 1991 film Cape Fear. “I got so scared when I walked in the room. I didn’t know who Robert De Niro was, so I was standing outside and I was talking the receptionist and she was like, ‘You know, he’s the most important actor of our time.’” Witherspoon recalled. “I was 14. … I never seen Good Fellas, like I’ve never seen The Godfather, so it totally got on my nerves.”

The Legally Blonde actress said when she went into the audition room, she couldn’t say one of her words and that De Niro had to say it for her. She laughed while noting that she did not get the role.

“He had to finish the lines for me, and then I auditioned for him 10 years later,” she said. “I thought he was never going to remember that I had bricked that audition, and he was like, ‘I remember you.’ I was like, ‘Me?’ He’s like, ‘Oh yeah, you’re the one who couldn’t say the word.’”

A few years later, Witherspoon continued, she interned for the movie Devil in a Blue Dress, starring Washington, to learn the other sides of the business. Some of her job requirements included answering phone calls and parking the actor’s Porsche when he came in, “which is not a good idea for a 17-year-old kid with a brand new driver’s license. … Oh my God, I stripped all the gears.”

The Big Little Lies actress said that years later, they saw each other at a wedding and Washington said he heard she had told the Porsche story. He then revealed to Witherspoon that while she was filming Water for Elephants, the actor’s daughter was the crewmember taking her costumes in and out of her trailer. “I was like, ‘That is amazing,’” she added. “So there was like this full-circle [moment].”