Just call Reese Witherspoon “Morty” from now on.
In a Wednesday, May 7, Instagram post detailing the different names she goes by, Witherspoon, 49, shared the interesting fact that her youngest child, Tennessee, 12, doesn’t call her “Mom” — but instead prefers the nickname “Morty.”
“*no clue why,” she added of her son’s moniker for her in the post, which also revealed she goes by her real name, Laura Jeanne, when it comes to government business.
“‘Reese’ to my fans, ‘Sister’ to my brother, ‘R Dubs’ to my friends, ‘Ladybug’ to my mother, ‘Pieces’ to my high school friends, ‘Miss Reese’ to my friends’ children, ‘Mama’ to my older kids, ‘Morty’ to my youngest *no clue why ????♀️,” she wrote over a clip of herself wearing a pink sweater and eyeglasses while sitting on her trailer steps on set.
“Just call me Morty ????♀️,” she captioned the post.
The nickname is most likely embraced by Witherspoon, who recently expressed that she encouraged her children to be “weird” and embrace their individuality.
She reposted her production company Hello Sunshine’s quote from The White Lotus star Aimee Lou Wood via her Instagram Story on Saturday, March 15, which read, “I spent a lot of my life worrying about being weird, and now I’m realizing it could be my superpower.” Witherspoon, for her part, wrote, “I love this!”
She added in a subsequent Story: “We were out to dinner the other night — me and my girlfriend and my two boys — and my girlfriend said, ‘What is one thing that your mom says to you that you always remember?’ And one of them said, ‘She tells me, if I have a choice to be normal or if I have a choice to be weird, I should be weird and it’s OK to stand out and be different.’”
Witherspoon said the moment filled her heart “with the deepest joy” that her son learned that message from her.
“It just meant so much to me that my kids know that it’s OK to be different and that it can actually end up being your superpower,” she said.
Witherspoon shares Tennessee with her ex-husband Jim Toth, whom she divorced in 2023 after 12 years of marriage. She also shares daughter Ava, 25, and son Deacon, 21, with ex-husband Ryan Phillippe, whom she was married to from 1999 until 2006.
The Legally Blonde star appears to have a solid coparenting relationship with both of her exes and tries her best to raise their children amicably.
“We were always both so devoted, even once we were no longer together, that that made [coparenting] easy. They were the priority,” Phillippe, 50, said of Ava and Deacon during a March 2024 interview with Fox News. “You see a lot of times these messy situations when that’s not the case whether the kids will be used as pawns or a way to hurt the other parent. We never did any of that stuff. We never spoke ill of each other. And we were always united in support of them. And now they’re both adults, but [Reese] and I have a friendship and we still have calls about various things in their lives and it worked out nice.”
The same reportedly goes for Witherspoon and Toth, 54.
