To audition to play the teenage Elle Woods, heroine of Amazon Prime Video’s prequel sequence to “Legally Blonde,” Lexi Minetree placed on a pink bikini and reclined in a scorching tub. Then the enjoyable started.
Impressed by a scene within the 2001 film, during which a swimsuit-clad Elle (Reese Witherspoon), submits a video utility to Harvard Regulation College, Minetree lists off her personal {qualifications}: staying match (she hoisted two-pound weights); studying new, detail-oriented abilities (she crocheted on digital camera); and juggling her numerous pursuits (she actually juggled limes — “I’m a pastime collector,” she instructed me).
“It was completely ridiculous,” Minetree mentioned of her tape over espresso in Manhattan not too long ago. “However in the easiest way — in Elle’s manner, as a result of she is ridiculous, as a result of she doesn’t care about being cringey. She simply is herself and owns it, which I like.”
And it labored: Minetree, now 25, a little-known actress from the suburbs of Atlanta, landed the high-profile starring position in “Elle,” which begins streaming on Wednesday. “After I noticed her tape, I used to be like, are we the identical individual?” Witherspoon, who conceived the sequence and govt produced it, mentioned in a video along with her plucky-chinned look-alike.
Minetree (pronounced MIN-eh-tree) radiates Elle vibes in different methods too — what Lauren Neustadter, an govt producer of the sequence, known as “the mixture of being extremely diligent and extremely optimistic.”
These qualities stretch far: The “Legally Blonde” universe already spans the unique novel, two film sequels and a Broadway musical. Within the quarter century since Elle Woods appeared as a totally accessorized, preternaturally assured sorority lady who battles blonde stereotypes and a rotten ex-boyfriend to propel herself to the highest of her legislation faculty class, the character has turn into an enormous feminist icon. “What, prefer it’s onerous?” would possibly as properly be embroidered on the backpacks of each overachieving coed. (And there are loads of them in Elle’s wake; Witherspoon has mentioned that girls — who now make up nearly all of legislation faculty college students — routinely inform her they had been impressed to attend after seeing the film).
However Elle Woods didn’t simply emerge strutting in her Jimmy Choos. What the “Elle” creators wished to seize was how she arrived at that sparkplug vitality as she grew up. “She is who she is within the film,” mentioned Laura Kittrell, a showrunner. “She simply can’t be absolutely shaped.”
Within the sequence Elle remains to be self-conscious sufficient to fret about what others consider her. As a 16-year-old lady, “you internalize what folks say,” Kittrell mentioned. “The factor that Lexi brings is that vulnerability.”
The sequence is ready in 1995, the yr the Elle of the film would have been a junior in highschool. After her household’s circumstances change, Elle and her mother and father (Tom Everett Scott and a scene-stealing June Diane Raphael) depart her pure environment — the luxe life and critical procuring of Bel Air, Calif. — and land in peak grunge-era Seattle. Perky and pink doesn’t fly there; Elle earnestly bedazzles a Nirvana tee solely to be rewarded with the worst ’90s epithet: poser. She struggles mightily to slot in and to understand an surroundings the place the whole lot just isn’t clear-cut and soft.
“She’s sort of studying in actual time, oh, perhaps the world is totally different than I as soon as skilled it,” Minetree mentioned. “Perhaps I care about various things that I didn’t even know I ought to care about.”
Rising up, the eldest baby in a blended household along with her mom and stepfather, each accountants, Minetree was a bookworm — “I gained this award for studying essentially the most books in the whole faculty” — who discovered her tribe among the many theater youngsters. “That’s the place I realized to really feel most myself, or my favourite model of myself,” she mentioned.
She graduated from U.S.C. with a double main in theater and public relations, landed the requisite young-actor “Regulation & Order” credit score and obtained a style of being first on the decision sheet on Lifetime films like “The Paramedic Who Stalked Me” and “My Amish Double Life.”
“Delicate, I do know,” she cracked.
However comedy was new to her, and at 5-foot-2 — about the identical as Witherspoon — she fearful about doing it in six-inch heels. “I don’t know should you can see the concern in my eyes,” she mentioned of an early scene the place she (efficiently) totters down stairs. (Like all her younger castmates, she additionally needed to discover ways to use an old-school telephone.)
Minetree doesn’t recall the primary time she noticed “Legally Blonde” — she was born simply earlier than it arrived in theaters. “I simply do not forget that it was sort of a consolation film, particularly as a younger girl,” she mentioned. “It was so empowering to observe.”
Others who got here of age with Elle Woods felt her affect deeply. “It modified my life,” Neustadter volunteered. “Seeing that she was underestimated and typically misunderstood, however that perception in herself and dedication and perseverance might truly result in super accomplishment — I feel that actually set me on my path.” She is now Witherspoon’s producing accomplice on the media firm Hi there Sunshine.
The concept for the sequence got here from a dialog the 2 had in 2023 about teenage ladies and the detrimental messages they obtain on social media and elsewhere, with deleterious results on their sense of self-worth. “Reese was the one which mentioned, ‘I feel this era wants Elle Woods,’” Neustadter recalled. Inside a number of months, they’d bought the sequence to Amazon.
The primary season is filled with one-liner references and fan service, just like the second Elle obtained and named Bruiser, her Chihuahua (a fellow “Gemini vegetarian”). A second season has already been filmed.
Minetree didn’t simply parrot the film’s admissions tape. A pure brunette, she had gone blonde on a whim a number of months earlier than the open casting for the present was introduced. (Round 5,000 folks utilized.) She instantly had a pal take headshots of her new look — pink outfit, golden waves — to publish on her IMDB itemizing.
“My P.R. mind kicked in,” she mentioned. “In the event that they appeared me up, I wished them to see Elle. I didn’t wish to give them a single motive” to cross. (Anticipating and navigating round folks’s perceptions — a really Elle Woods transfer.)
Then there have been her binders filled with notes — tabbed, color-coded, continuously re-collated. “This very complicated system,” laughed Caroline Dries, the opposite showrunner. However it was efficient: Earlier than the primary day of capturing, when many actors barely know their very own strains, Minetree had memorized the scripts for all eight episodes.
The producers nonetheless sounded shocked speaking about it, particularly as a result of Minetree was in practically each scene, with dialogue-heavy materials. “She’s by no means going to have this many phrases a minute except she’s in a David Mamet play,” Kittrell joked.
After lengthy days of filming — Vancouver stood in for Seattle — Minetree holed up in her resort health club, poring over her binders whereas on the treadmill. (Elle’s research habits, to a tee.) She labored with a vocal coach to grasp the character’s distinctive cadence: shiny, ethereal, bouncy and but “not like a Valley Woman,” Minetree emphasised.
Kittrell and Dries in contrast her to Lucille Ball in her supply and bodily comedy; within the picture shoot for this text, she bounded barefoot up rocks in Central Park, whereas carrying a diaphanous slip gown — a nymph with a bouldering behavior.
“Elle is form of the heightened factor within the present, after which the whole lot else round her is pretty grounded,” Dries mentioned.
Raphael, the comedian actress (“Grace & Frankie”), whose character is supposed to be a stand-in for the era of girls who did develop up with Elle, mentioned she was “blown away” by how properly Minetree dealt with being a pacesetter on set and by her portrayal.
“It’s not an impression. It’s her providing her personal humanity and previous and historical past to this character,” she mentioned, “coping with the form of mania of hormones, and what you undergo as a teenage lady.”
Minetree, who moved to New York after faculty and nonetheless lives with two roommates in a Brooklyn condominium, is aware of her life might change imminently, even when she will’t fairly consider it. Getting acknowledged on the road — “I can’t think about what that will be like,” she mentioned, blue eyes large. However she hopes to method it with the unabashed moxie (or the cringe) of Elle.
“I wish to take my work severely,” she mentioned. “However not myself.”
Alexis Soloski contributed reporting.
