The 41-year-old actor said she had a tough time finding a distributor for her film "Gone Girl" initially, but things smoothened after the book became a bestseller, reported FemaleFirst.
"I've also had studio heads say to me, 'We don't want to make biopics about women,' or more simply, 'We're not interested in female-driven material'.
"My first go-round as a producer with 'Gone Girl'? Every studio passed but one. When the book hit number one on the best seller lists, it was a different story," Witherspoon told Glamour magazine.
"Another thing I think about a lot is how it feels to be a minority woman in America, so rarely seeing yourself onscreen, and it's unconscionable. When I asked Mindy Kaling, 'Don't you ever get exhausted by always having to create your own roles?' she said, 'Reese, I've never had anything that I didn't create for myself.'
"I thought, Wow, I feel like a jerk for asking that; I used to have parts that just showed up for me. I can't imagine how hard it is to write your own parts and simultaneously have to change people's perceptions of what a woman of colour is in today's society," she said.