"Raw Dog" Reese Witherspoon recently sat down with Vogue for an interview. The meal: Lunch. The look: "Crisp," in a Stella McCartney dress and Valentino sandals. The subject: Cuss words and simulated fucking.

In her upcoming film Wild, Witherspoon plays a woman named Cheryl Strayed who hikes 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail alone, in a journey from lost to found. The movie is based on the real-life Strayed's memoir, Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found, which Reese Witherspoon read on a plane and decided the only way this story could be improved were if Reese Witherspoon were somehow involved.

But Wild is more than just hundreds of hours of scenes of Reese Witherspoon, alone, hiking. For one thing, much of the footage will presumably be edited down for length and narrative clarity.

For another, there are also sex scenes, in which Reese Witherspoon (as "Cheryl") is a primary participant. And, child, Reese Witherspoon is not trying to hear that you don't want to see her have sex, and hear her blasphemes, and hear her have sex.

"I just didn't want to hear, 'Oh, we don't want to see Reese have sex. . . . Oh, can we not have any profanity?'"

Guess what: There will be profanity. Guess what: There will be sex—raw and real.

"I wanted it to be truthful, I wanted it to be raw, I wanted it to be real."

So real and raw were the ensuing scenes that it might even appear to audiences that Witherspoon is fucking in a trance. In fact, she sort of is; elsewhere in the profile, Vogue reveals that Witherspoon hired a hypnotist to soothe her nerves before filming the on screen sexual encounters.

Witherspoon found the drug scenes in Wild hard to film—on set Strayed had to show Witherspoon how to shoot heroin; "I was like 'Come on, people, haven't you guys ever done this?' " recalls the author—but even more difficult were the sex scenes, which Witherspoon so dreaded that she employed a hypnotist to help quell her nerves.

Later during lunch, Witherspoon comes as close to saying I am a hellcat sex demon who will steal a stranger's car on a dare as a person can come without actually saying those words in precise that order.

"Nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors, but I think there's a general sense now that I've lived a pretty"—she searches for the right word—"textured life."

In addition to the print profile, Witherspoon also appears in a video for Vogue's stiltedly-manic "73 Questions" web series, in which she performs a perfect back handspring on her children's in-ground trampoline.

When asked, in the video, what historical decade and place she would most like to inhabit, Witherspoon answers "Probably the '40s. In America."

A time of rations and blackouts.

[Image of Reese Witherspoon executing perfect back handspring via Vogue.com]