Sarah Harden: from Geelong girl to Hollywood powerbroker
A self-described ‘girl from Geelong’ teams up with an A-list movie star to create a $1bn Hollywood juggernaut. It’s not a fantasy rom-com script – this is Sarah Harden’s remarkable life story.
Sarah Harden sweeps in late, past the palm-fringed swimming pool, past the lunchtime tables full of Hollywood A-listers, and arrives at our table brimming with apologies. “Sorry I’m late and sorry about the bags under my eyes, I was up until 2am last night trying to sort something out,’’ she says. What was it, I ask. “We are in a very competitive situation for a TV series that we pitched [to potential producers], so we’ve got multiple bids which we have to evaluate and that has to close by 5pm today,’’ she explains.
She is barely seated when her phone beeps again. This time it’s a different drama, so to speak. The actor in a new TV series wants a new condition in their contract before they sign on the bottom line. But a film crew is already on location on a tropical island and ready to roll. “I’ve got to sort it out today, or else we’ll have to reschedule the whole thing,” she says.
Our lunch in the San Vicente Bungalows, the most exclusive private club in Hollywood, is poorly timed. Harden, the Australian CEO of Hello Sunshine, the media powerhouse behind shows such as Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere and Where the Crawdads Sing, has to make some key decisions within hours that will potentially be worth millions of dollars. What’s more, the Hello Sunshine founder – actress, Oscar winner and entrepreneur Reese Witherspoon – was supposed to join us for lunch but a last-minute change of schedule meant she had to fly to Nashville that morning.
So Harden spends the first part of our lunch apologising to me for the calls as she juggles her phone in one hand and tries to eat salad with the other. A few tables away is a well-known rapper with his hoodie over his head, and sitting nearby is a celebrity who is a household name in Australia. But the rules of the club dictate you can’t report on who you see at this West Hollywood hideaway for celebrities and business moguls. The staff place tape over the phone cameras of non-members like me when we enter to remind us that photographs are banned. Club members reportedly include Elon Musk and Steven Spielberg. The club even tried to hide the fact that after the Oscars, Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga partied here.
Harden checks a text from Witherspoon about a possible senior appointment to the company and finally she is off her phone. Soon we are talking about everything from her life in LA, to Australia, to the politics and big business of Hollywood. But mostly we talk about her almost unfathomable journey from a child kicking the footy with her brothers on the streets of Geelong to the CEO of a Hollywood juggernaut that she and Witherspoon created in 2016 and sold in 2021 for an eye-watering $US900 million ($1.29bn). That sale made Witherspoon the richest actress in Hollywood and turned Harden – who still calls herself “a girl from Geelong” – into a bona fide Hollywood powerbroker. “I pinch myself,” the 50-year-old says of her life. “Every day.”
It was “a very big dream I had”, Witherspoon tells me by email from Nashville when asked how she met Harden. The star of movies including Legally Blonde, Sweet Home Alabama, Walk the Line and Wild says her dream was to build a new kind of company in Hollywood. “A company where women lead the charge on telling their own stories in their own words.”
In 2016, Witherspoon was already a major Hollywood figure, with a Best Actress Oscar to her name for playing June Carter Cash in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line. But the background story, now cemented in movieland folklore, is that she was also frustrated by the roles she was getting and the lack of great acting parts for women. “I was just kind of floundering career-wise, ’cause I wasn’t making things I was passionate about,” she once said. “I went on a studio tour around every single studio head [in LA] and I said, ‘What are you developing for women?’ and only one studio was developing something for a woman and [they] actually said, ‘We already have a movie with a woman starring this year, we can’t have two’.”
Most of the women’s roles available at that time in Hollywood were as a support to the male lead. Agents would even warn Witherspoon, who had her first child at 23, against playing a mother because it would “age” her. “There was a lot of talk about who we were supposed to be for other people – and, trust me, I listened to it for a long time,” she says. “It was like we were supposed to only create fantasy people.” Says Harden: “Reese told me one day she read a script for a role that she was told every actress in Hollywood was salivating about, and she was like, ‘Wow, this is terrible, we need better material’.”
In a life-changing moment, Witherspoon came across the Australian at just the right time. Harden was living in LA running Otter Media, which was operating in the (at the time) burgeoning subscription-based video-on-demand area, when Witherspoon turned up out of the blue. “Reese came in to see us and said, ‘I’ve got this idea for a company,’” Harden recalls.
Witherspoon wanted to form a multi- pronged Hollywood media brand to create content for women by women – something which, surprisingly, did not exist at that time; it was years before the MeToo and Time’s Up movements and the Harvey Weinstein saga catapulted issues of gender and equality in Hollywood into the mainstream.
Witherspoon was already an accomplished businesswoman at that time, having formed her own production company – partnered with another talented Australian, Bruna Papandrea – that had optioned the books Gone Girl and Wild and turned them into hit movies. But Witherspoon needed a partner who knew more than she did about the intersection of entertainment and business, to help her take her idea to the next level. Harden was to prove the missing piece of the puzzle.
“I had lunch with Reese that day at [mediaentrepreneur] Seth Rodsky’s house in Beverly Hills and she talked about her vision,” says Harden. “She knew there was a huge gap in the market with women. We knew the stats. Women are at least 50 per cent of the box office, yet we are just six per cent of directors. We have only 10 per cent of speaking time in major movies. We are not involved enough in the formation and creation of stories. Women have been structurally silenced from the storytelling process in Hollywood for decades. So it stands to reason that if you are excluded from the creation and process of storytelling and writing and directing, then you are missing stories that are going to resonate with women because they are not seeing the full range of their lived experience reflected on screen.”
When Witherspoon explained to Harden her plan to create a media brand based on women telling their own stories for women, the Australian was gobsmacked. It seemed so simple, so obvious, and yet it had not been done. “If you want to change the story, you’ve got to change the storytellers,” says Harden. “There was this giant gap, this white space just waiting to be filled. Reese saw it and so did I. I was like, ‘Oh my God Reese, I know the first five people to hire.” Harden, Witherspoon explains, “came in with a tremendous amount of media experience”.
“It was just obvious,” former Walt Disney executive Kevin Mayer tells me. “It didn’t take a lot of prescience to see that women storytellers were under-served. It’s just that Sarah and Reese grabbed onto it and decided to make it their own mission and change the story.”
So the Oscar winner and the girl from Geelong joined forces to try to change the narrative for women in Hollywood by creating Hello Sunshine. “The business was so in line with Sarah’s values,” her twin brother Scotty Vickers-Willis tells me over coffee in Melbourne. “She would say, ‘We [women] don’t want a seat at the board table, we want a new table’.”
Scotty and Sarah were inseparable as kids. The twins and their younger brother Mark would hoon around the streets of Geelong on their BMX bikes, stealing into Kardinia Park to watch the last quarter of Geelong Cats footy games because they didn’t have to pay. Sarah wore a Cats duffle coat with her playing hero Michael Turner’s number on it. “I was definitely a tomboy,” she says. “We fished, played cricket and tennis and spent summers at the beach.”
Both parents were entrepreneurs and their influence quietly shaped her. “She was always determined,” Scotty says of his sister. Their dad worked in property development and their mum, after an early career as a nurse, ran a successful commercial real estate business. They squirrelled away their money to send their kids to good private schools; Sarah attended prestigious Geelong Grammar. As a schoolgirl Harden was already attracted to the notion of strong career women and she wrote to Jana Wendt on current affairs show 60 Minutes to tell her that she wanted to be a journalist. “We used to watch 60 Minutes on Sunday as a family and Jana was one of the few high-profile women on television and I just thought she was awesome,” she says.
Harden missed out on getting into law at the University of Melbourne by one mark so she did an honours arts degree instead. Halfway through, she decided she wanted to be a doctor so she did Year 12 chemistry at night school before changing her mind yet again.
She finally found her compass when doing a summer internship with Procter & Gamble, trying to sell their products to chemists and grocery stores. “It was a terrifying experience but awesome too,” she says. “So I thought maybe I want to do something a bit more business-oriented. After all, I had entrepreneurial parents.”
After graduating in 1993 with a degree in international relations, Harden landed a job at top management consultancy Boston Consulting in Melbourne, despite not having a business degree. “Going to Boston Consulting was terrifying for me – I had never used Excel except for my 21st birthday list,” she says in an interview in the LA office of Hello Sunshine. “I took a little box of things into my office on my second day but I never unpacked it because I was so sure that I was going to be fired.” One of the senior partners at Boston spotted her talents early after watching her in a meeting with a client. “He came up to me and said, ‘What you did in that meeting, keep doing it. I saw your poise, you read the room, you knew when to speak.’ He said, ‘This business is not just about running the models. You blew me away in that meeting’.” Harden was stunned. “I was like, ‘What the f..k? I can do this’.” So she decided to shoot for the moon by applying to Harvard Business School.
But then her world fell apart. Her beloved mother, Louise, was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of just 46. The three children moved back to Geelong to nurse her. It was a heartbreaking time. Later, at Harvard, Harden wrote in a paper: “It’s impossible to overstate the impact my mother’s death had on me. It has coloured all my choices since.” Those words were written in 2000. When I read them back to Harden, she fights to hold back tears. “There was a real reckoning there because it makes you think, ‘You have to make the most of it’,” she says. “I think that both of my parents wanted me to have a big life.”
So Harden flew to Harvard and unleashed her ambitions. She graduated in the top five per cent of her class as a Baker Scholar and even played ice hockey for the Harvard Business School team, where her teammates dubbed her the “Thunder from Down Under”. Every Sunday she still has a video catch-up with three of her best girlfriends who played on that team.
While at Harvard she became fascinated with the business of media and entertainment. “I thought to myself, I’ve got to do something entrepreneurial in the US,” he says. She co-founded a media software company in Silicon Valley and “rode the dot.com boom up and then down”, she says. It was at a party in San Francisco that she met her husband Dave, with whom she now has three kids – Lulu, 18, Tommy, 16, and Fletcher, 13.
The couple then moved to LA to join entertainment company Ascent Media, where she bought and built media businesses around the world and learnt “the guts of the media business”. From there she joined the Fox Network for four years, where she worked on deals for cable sports and digital, including the first business plan to launch Hulu. Her fast-rising career coincided with her having her first two children and the reality of the life-work balance was at times brutal. “It was crazy,” she says. “There were lots of tears, lots of long nights.”
Harden was then lured to Hong Kong by News Corp to oversee its joint ventures across Asia, a five-year stint that she loved, before moving back to LA in 2014 to become EVP at the Chernin Group working for ex Newscorp chief operating officer Peter Chernin. At the Chernin Group she worked on creating Otter Media – a joint venture with ATT and Chernin to build next generation media brands – which she then led as president. By 2016, Harden had already lived many lives, as a start-up queen, a global executive, a mum of three and an LA expert in the fast-changing business landscape in Hollywood. She didn’t need anyone to turbocharge her life or her fast-rising career. Then Reese Witherspoon knocked on her door.
In Witherspoon’s office at the Santa Monica headquarters of Hello Sunshine she keeps a selection of her favourite books in a bookcase near her large oval marble desk. Among them are copies of Big Little Lies by Australian author Liane Moriarty, Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng and Wild by Cheryl Strayed, three novels that Witherspoon turned into hit TV series and a movie. Harden’s office next door is also full of books reflecting the fact that, as brother Scotty says, “both Sarah and Reese are complete bookworms”.
When asked how she helped get the new company off the ground, Harden gets so pumped that she trips over words and leaves sentences unfinished while jumping to the next thought. “I thought, ‘We’ve got to start where we have an advantage, which is scripted film and television where we could leverage Reese’s unbelievable career as an actress’.” Harden proposed building an online book club to push the strategy of choosing a book each month and sometimes optioning rights and making a series or movie from it. “Reese was already posting photos of books on Instagram; she was in direct conversation with her female audience already. So I said to her, ‘We’ve got to tent-pole that bookclub, leverage your social media following and choose one book a month’.”
The first big series for Hello Sunshine was the smash hit Big Little Lies, starring Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern and Meryl Streep. For both Harden and Witherspoon the success of the series proved their theory that there was a rich market out there for shows that centred around females. “Big Little Lies was a juggernaut, but for women of course it was because it just reflects our real lives at the school gate,” says Harden. The school pick-up scenes were shot at the local school just down the road from Harden’s home in Brentwood, LA. “The show was about motherhood and complex female friendships and dynamics with your children so of course it did f..ing well, but at that time that [sort of show] was rare. “During Big Little Lies Reese said to me, ‘You know what, Sarah? This is the first time in my career that I’ve been top of the call sheet with other actresses. I’m in an ensemble cast with five women.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ and she said she had only ever been cast against a man.”
Since then Witherspoon’s book club has become a powerhouse with 2.5 million followers on Instagram and 316,000 on Facebook, more than three times the following of the high-profile book club run by her friend Oprah Winfrey. Witherspoon’s book club is now so influential that when a book of the month is chosen it’s like winning the lottery for the author, given that four in five of the book club choices have gone on to make The New York Times bestseller list.
“With Where the Crawdads Sing we chose a first-time author [Delia Owens] in her 60s,” says Harden. “I remember reading it and thinking, ‘This is beautiful’ and I flicked it to Reese, saying, ‘You gotta read this’.” The book has since become one of the best-selling novels of all time, with sales topping 15 million around the world. Hello Sunshine produced the movie version of the book, which grossed more than $US140 million on a $US24 million budget.
Harden and Witherspoon hire external and internal book scouts to read more than 100 books a month and compile a shortlist for Witherspoon, who makes the final choice. “But sometimes Reese just sends us something she has been reading and falls in love with it and then the list is very short,” says Harden. In 2020, three book-inspired Hello Sunshine shows – Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere and The Morning Show (starring Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston) – garnered 18 Emmy Award nominations. Harden has also expanded Hello Sunshine into a multi-platform media company that reflects the changing face of the entertainment industry. “It was once very siloed,” says Harden. “There was film and television. Now we are building a media brand.” Click onto the Hello Sunshine website and you’ll find a buffet of vastly different content, including women-centric podcasts, video conversations, food and style tips and even children’s books.
“That’s because some stories about women are best told in podcast form, some are just social posts, some are short stories or documentaries,” says Harden. “Our mission takes many forms.” The website tells it like this: “We are changing the narrative for women – and we are telling women’s stories, in their own words. We sound like heels on the ground. Emails being sent. Pen on paper. Wine glasses clinking. Taking off those heels at the end of the day! Laughter. And sometimes, tears.”
With the runaway success of shows like Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere, Where the Crawdads Sing and The Morning Show it was inevitable that bigger Hollywood players would take a closer interest in what Harden and Witherspoon created. “There is a huge amount of respect for what Sarah and Reese have built in a very short space of time,” says Chelsey Martin, Australia’s former consul-general in LA who now works for Bondi Partners, founded by former Australian ambassador to the US Joe Hockey. “Now they have what everyone in Hollywood wants: a constant pipeline of content that they already know resonates with their target audiences.”
In late 2021 Candle Media, co-founded by former Walt Disney Executives Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs, bought Hello Sunshine from Witherspoon, Harden and its management team and shareholders including ATT/Warner Media for $US900 million, while retaining Harden and Witherspoon to run the company as they have been doing since 2016.
Mayer and Staggs say Harden was a fierce negotiator. “She is great, she is a tough executive and a strong woman,” says Mayer. “She is a very, very hard worker, she is an amazingly effective executive. Her reputation is quite sterling and everyone in this town respects her. And she likes a drink,” he adds with a smile. Says Staggs: “Sarah is very compelling and very thoughtful, while Reese is fantastic and a real star.”
According to Forbes magazine, Witherspoon pocketed an estimated $US120 million after tax from the sale, making her one of the world’s richest actresses. Harden won’t say what she made from the deal but concedes she could choose to never work again. Nothing could be further from her mind, though. She says the sale has given Hello Sunshine the capital to finance larger and more ambitious projects in the years ahead.
The most unusual thing about Harden is that she manages to juggle such a big job, a busy family and lots of friends with apparent ease. In person she is quick to laugh and also to cry. She swears, calls out bullshit and hasn’t got a trace of an American accent despite so many years of living in LA.
“She definitely has a deep connection to her home country and it comes across in her warmth, her humour and the very Australian quality of never taking herself too seriously,” Witherspoon tells me. “She loves licorice allsorts, she calls everyone ‘mate’ and always talks about Skippy the bush kangaroo even though no one in our company knows what she is talking about.”
Harden returns home each summer and stays in holiday houses with her extended family at Barwon Heads, near Geelong. “I totally consider myself Australian,” she says. “I’m low-ego and I love being part of a team. I love coming home and every time Qantas lands and they play I Still Call Australia Home, I cry.”
But Harden has also grown to love Los Angeles. She has formed a close group of about 25 female CEOs and other players in the media and entertainment industry and has regular dinners with them. “These are women with a lot of power in LA and I love to have dinner with them,” she says. “They give me courage.”
Former consul-general Martin, who has become a close friend, says Harden has somehow carved out a private life outside her crazy work hours. “Somehow, despite juggling such a big job and three busy kids, she’s always that person who shows up when you need them most, to check in and drop off a book or a coffee, go for a walk or share a glass of wine. Somehow she always finds time for the people and things that matter in her life,” she says.
Harden says she switches off by hiking with her kids and her dog in the Santa Monica mountains at the back of her home. She and her husband have recently bought a small house in nearby Malibu because it reminds her of Barwon Heads, a place where she can have “tacos and a glass of rosé” on the balcony.
These days Harden says she is no longer driven primarily by the work or the money but by the mission to try to create a better Hollywood for women. “I feel a heavy responsibility to get it right,” she says. “If we f..k it up it makes it harder for the women coming after us. I have exceeded everything I thought I would ever be able to do and so now I am driven by this sense of responsibility.”
She falls silent for a moment and tears well in her eyes. “Our mission is to change the narrative for women,’’ she says finally. “We want what Reese and I have built together to create opportunities for the next generation of women in Hollywood.”
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