‘Sweet Home Alabama’ Cast: Where Are They Now?

You can’t take the honky-tonk out of the woman! Sweet Home Alabama turned a traditional rom-com nearly as quickly because it hit theaters in 2002, because of the allure — and chemistry — of leads Reese Witherspoon and Josh Lucas.

“Small-town girl moves to the big city and forgets her roots” is a plot so clichéd at this level that it reveals up in about 90 % of made-for-TV Christmas motion pictures, however in Sweet Home Alabama, it simply works. Witherspoon stars as Melanie Smooter, a New York City dressmaker who hides her Pigeon Creek, Alabama, origins by utilizing the final identify “Carmichael.”

That plan appears to be figuring out for her till she will get engaged to Andrew Hennings (Patrick Dempsey), the rich son of NYC’s mayor (Candice Bergen). The downside is that she’s already married — to Jake Perry (Lucas), the childhood sweetheart who was alleged to have divorced her years in the past however by no means signed the papers. The solely answer is to return to Pigeon Creek and get the divorce finalized, however as a result of this can be a romantic comedy, that’s not how issues between Melanie and Jake play out.

The film is a fantasy, after all, however Witherspoon has mentioned that Melanie’s struggles truly mirror a few of her personal experiences as a Louisiana-born, Tennessee-raised actress making an attempt to make it in Hollywood.

“When I read the script I was like, ‘Do these people know my life story?’” she mentioned throughout a Town Hall occasion in 2018. “Because no matter how much you love where you’re from, when you get a little bit older, you get nostalgic for it. When I was 18, I was like, ‘I am out of here! I am never coming back!’”

The Oscar winner clearly had a change of coronary heart, as she now shares a house in Nashville along with her husband, Jim Toth. “When I was going through Sweet Home Alabama, I was like, ‘This is exactly how so many young people feel. You want to leave home and then you realize that there’s so many important things about the closeness of family or people who knew you before,’” she recalled in 2018. “And I feel really like that movie really encapsulated those ideas. And it was a lot of fun. It was so much fun. I had a great time doing it.”

Keep scrolling to see what the cast of Sweet Home Alabama has been as much as because the film premiered in 2002: