Reese Witherspoon might already have a lot on her plate—from adapting Delia Owens’ best-selling novel, Where The Crawdads Sing, to the upcoming Legally Blonde 3 with Mindy Kaling—but it looks like the actress is preparing to add yet another Hollywood blockbuster to her to-do list: Sweet Home Alabama.
Taking to Instagram for a Throwback Thursday on July 8, 2021, Witherspoon posted photos from the 2002 rom-com, where her character Melanie calls off her wedding to fiancé Andrew (played by Patrick Dempsey) after realising she’s still legally married to (and madly in love with) highschool sweetheart Jake (Josh Lucas).
“Do you remember what she said?” she captioned.
Among those to guess correctly in the comment section? None other than Dakota Fanning, who fans will remember played the younger version of Melanie in the film.
“The truth is I gave my heart away a long time ago, my whole heart, and I never really got it back ❤️,” she wrote.
Fanning’s comment didn’t go unnoticed either, with Witherspoon sweetly replying: “Love you, little Melanie.”
The nostalgic post also comes just weeks after Lucas revealed he’d “love” to do a sequel.
“The issue is Reese has got a book club. And I’m saying that, like, laughingly,” he said while appearing on SiriusXM’s Pop Culture Spotlight With Jessica Shaw. “I’ve heard, like, ‘Oh, you can talk to her about stuff five years from now’… She’s a mogul.”
The actor added he always knew Witherspoon would go on to be a Hollywood heavyweight.
“Back when I was doing Sweet Home Alabama, I for some reason remember telling the director or somebody… ‘I bet this woman ends up running a movie studio one day,'” he said. “And she’s even beyond that at this point. I mean, she’s her own version of Oprah Winfrey now, right? And it’s extraordinary and not surprising, either at all.”
As for what the potential sequel could offer up? It’s not quite what fans would expect.
“The proposal that Andy Tennant, the director, had, which is quite interesting, is that my character is back in Alabama and Reese is actually, her character is in New York with our kids and we’re divorced. So, their whole life is super complicated. And Patrick Dempsey’s character is still in the picture,” Lucas told Good Morning America in 2019. “But that’s just the proposal.”
Witherspoon also hasn’t ruled out the idea entirely either, revealing in a Facebook Life Q&A via People that “if Disney wants to make a sequel they can just call me. I would happily make Sweet Home Alabama 2.”
Fingers crossed!
