I spent the July Fourth weekend binging the Legally Blonde prequel series, Elle. It’s a fish-out-of-water story about bubbly, pink-loving, LA-fashionista Elle struggling to fit in when her family relocates to Seattle at the height of the grunge era. It takes place in 1995, when she’s a high school junior. I had issues with the pacing, but enjoyed it overall and am looking forward to season two. Without giving spoilers, it takes a hard turn midway through the season. It’s a jarring but captivating twist that hooked me. The whole cast was great, especially Lexi Minetree’s take on Elle Woods. There were times when she looked and sounded so much like Reese Witherspoon. Lexi recently sat down for a profile in the New York Times where she talked about the different ways in which she embodied the character. Here are some excerpts:

Her Elle-inspired audition tape: To audition to play the teenage Elle Woods, Lexi Minetree put on a pink bikini and reclined in a hot tub…Inspired by a scene in the 2001 movie, in which a swimsuit-clad Elle (Reese Witherspoon), submits a video application to Harvard Law School, Minetree lists off her own qualifications: staying fit (she hoisted two-pound weights); learning new, detail-oriented skills (she crocheted on camera); and juggling her various interests.

“It was absolutely ridiculous,” Minetree said of her tape over coffee in Manhattan recently. “But in the best way — in Elle’s way, because she is ridiculous, because she doesn’t care about being cringey. She just is herself and owns it, which I love.”

Reese-approved: “When I saw her tape, I was like, are we the same person?” Witherspoon, who conceived the series and executive produced it, said in a video with her plucky-chinned look-alike.

The Hero’s Journey: What the “Elle” creators wanted to capture was how she arrived at that sparkplug energy as she grew up. “She is who she is in the movie,” said Laura Kittrell, a showrunner. “She just can’t be fully formed.”

In the series Elle is still self-conscious enough to worry about what others think of her. As a 16-year-old girl, “you internalize what people say,” Kittrell said. “The thing that Lexi brings is that vulnerability.”

“She’s kind of learning in real time, oh, maybe the world is different than I once experienced it,” Minetree said. “Maybe I care about different things that I didn’t even know I should care about.”

Learning new (old) skills: [Minetree] graduated from U.S.C. with a double major in theater and public relations, landed the requisite young-actor “Law & Order” credit and got a taste of being first on the call sheet on Lifetime movies like “The Paramedic Who Stalked Me” and “My Amish Double Life.” But comedy was new to her, and at 5-foot-2 — about the same as Witherspoon — she worried about doing it in six-inch heels. “I don’t know if you can see the fear in my eyes,” she said of an early scene where she (successfully) totters down stairs. (Like all her young castmates, she also had to learn how to use an old-school phone.)

She went all out to get the gig: Minetree didn’t just parrot the movie’s admissions tape. A natural brunette, she had gone blonde on a whim a few months before the open casting for the show was announced. (Around 5,000 people applied.) She immediately had a friend take headshots of her new look — pink outfit, golden waves — to post on her IMDB listing. “My P.R. brain kicked in,” she said. “If they looked me up, I wanted them to see Elle. I didn’t want to give them a single reason” to pass. (Anticipating and navigating around people’s perceptions — a very Elle Woods move.)

Embodying Elle: Then there were her binders full of notes — tabbed, color-coded, constantly re-collated. “This very confusing system,” laughed Caroline Dries, the other showrunner. But it was effective: Before the first day of shooting, when many actors barely know their own lines, Minetree had memorized the scripts for all eight episodes. The producers still sounded shocked talking about it, especially because Minetree was in nearly every scene, with dialogue-heavy material. “She’s never going to have this many words a minute unless she’s in a David Mamet play,” Kittrell joked. After long days of filming — Vancouver stood in for Seattle — Minetree holed up in her hotel gym, poring over her binders while on the treadmill. (Elle’s study habits, to a tee.) She worked with a vocal coach to master the character’s distinctive cadence: bright, airy, bouncy and yet “not like a Valley Girl,” Minetree emphasized.

She still lives with her roommates in Brooklyn: Minetree, who moved to New York after college and still lives with two roommates in a Brooklyn apartment, knows her life may change imminently, even if she can’t quite believe it. Getting recognized on the street — “I can’t imagine what that would be like,” she said, blue eyes wide. But she hopes to approach it with the unabashed moxie (or the cringe) of Elle. “I want to take my work seriously,” she said. “But not myself.”

[From The New York Times]

I love that Lexi marketed herself by “Elle-ifying” her IMDB page and am impressed that she arrived on set knowing the lines for all eight episodes. That Type A attitude makes her Reese’s kindred spirit. The tidbit about having to learn how to use an old-school phone is making me feel so old, though! I noticed they used landlines and payphones throughout the season. I’m always amused at younger generations needing to learn how to use them. You just pick it up and dial the number. We even had speed dial in the 90s! There were plenty of other cheesy references to that era, including a joke about how no one sits around to check their email, which made me laugh.

Photos credit: Steve Vas/Future Image/Cover Images