Warning: This post contains spoilers for the first season of Elle.
Now she tells us. Twenty-five years after Legally Blonde, it appears that Elle Woods omitted some compelling information from her Harvard Law admissions video.
In Prime Video’s prequel series Elle, the quintessential California girl (played by Lexi Minetree) moves to Seattle as a high school junior in 1995, after a botched nose job runs her plastic surgeon father (Tom Everett Scott) out of Beverly Hills. While struggling to assimilate in the land of flannel, Elle ultimately deduces that her married principal (Matt Oberg) has a love child — and that he’s embezzling money to pay off his blackmailer, the superintendent (the late James Van Der Beek in his final role), who’s set up a fake earthquake insurance company to fund his mayoral campaign.
Elle’s big reveal, which takes place in front of a packed audience at a mayoral debate, saves the framed school secretary (Amy Pietz) from jail time. That was something that show creator Laura Kittrell kept in mind as they built the multi-episode mystery.
“The thing that we always went back to was, ‘This will basically be our courtroom moment from the movie,’” Kittrell tells Gold Derby. “We had that tone and that landing to stick.” And they do: Elle notes that the woman in a photo with the principal couldn’t possibly be his wife because, as a true Seattleite, his spouse would never own a suede coat and as a redhead can’t wear orange.
Minetree, who was handpicked by Elle originator Reese Witherspoon to play the teen, memorized her lines in all of Season 1’s eight episodes before filming began because she knew she’d be working 15-hour days. “And Elle, she likes to talk a lot, bless her heart,” the 25-year-old actress says. “This debate scene was like a nine-page monologue. I just really wanted to come in ready, because a scene like that takes momentum. It was really fun to do, and I was really happy with how it turned out.”
Witherspoon, who serves as an executive producer on the series, inspired another key plot point: Elle’s return to Los Angeles in the season finale for an internship at Cosmo. “Reese had mentioned, ‘At some point, she should do Cosmo quizzes,’ and [in the writers room], it sort of evolved into, ‘What if the quiz was a frame for each episode?’” explains co-showrunner Caroline Dries. “And then it became this internship, which was the perfect plot spine. Because if a girl is kidnapped from her natural environment and held hostage in a city she doesn’t want to be in, of course, her natural inclination is, How do I get out of here?”
Back in L.A. after her mother (the fabulous June Diane Raphael) sends in Elle’s Seattle-damning essay without her knowledge, Elle competes with her fellow interns for the chance to help style Heather Locklear for the Golden Globes. She earns the opportunity by suggesting a safety-pinned slit dress — similar to the one Locklear actually wore to the ’96 Globes — but at a pre-party, Elle realizes she’s no longer excited by the idea of doing everything that’s expected and easy for her.
“That’s when you get to see her growth as a person,” Minetree says. “No one’s there to push her anymore. I think we’ve all had those moments in our life where we’ve gone through something really hard, and then we look back and we’re like, ‘Wow, I’m not that person I was before.’ Sometimes we outgrow things, and that’s okay. That’s human. I think that’s a really, really beautiful moment to see.”
At that point, Elle rushes back to Seattle, arriving just in time to catch her friend Liz (Gabrielle Policano) performing with her band at the winter (in)formal her classmates managed to plan without her. “That was, like, the coolest day of my life, genuinely,” Policano says of filming the rock show. “I’m also a musician, so it meant so much to me. This song that I sing, which is called ‘High School,’ was written by Sleater-Kinney. They were there on Zoom when I recorded it. I was just like, ‘This is so normal and cool,’ and it’s not normal in any capacity. It was an unbelievable experience.”
Liz has her pre-show nerves calmed by mean girl-turned-ally Kimberly (Chandler Kinney), who kisses Liz backstage after pretending their summer fling never happened. “We only had so many moments where we could get a glimpse of that relationship onscreen, and it kind of all had to come to this beautiful moment in the finale,” Kinney says. “So we put in as many charged looks as we could throughout the season, but it’s tricky to have the pressure of that and not have as much build up face to face. But it was also easy, because Gabby’s one of the best people I’ve ever worked with.”
Presumably, we’ll get to see how that relationship progresses in Season 2, where we may also learn if Elle’s parents will try to save their marriage and how Elle’s love triangle plays out. Miss Woods now has permission from her friend Shannon (Danielle Chand) to pursue Shannon’s jock ex, Miles (Jacob Moskovitz), who Elle had previously kissed. But activist Dustin (Zac Looker) smooched Elle at the (in)formal as Miles looked on.
“The l thing that I like about the way the show is written is that neither of them are bad options. In a lot of love triangles, it feels like, well, this guy’s nice but he’s not as exciting, whereas this guy’s a dick to everyone,” Looker says. “We’ve kind of moved past that. It’s not so much about which one of them she picks as an evaluation of them, but more like which parts of herself she’s more drawn to and which parts of herself she wants to explore more.”
In his mind, Dustin challenges Elle and gets her outside of her comfort zone. “He pushes her to be honest with herself about a lot of stuff, which I’m not sure she’s always used to,” Looker says. “Whereas Miles reflects completely different elements of her.”
Both young men make questionable decisions during the season, none more shocking than Miles telling Shannon about his kiss with Elle while Shannon is at her late mother’s Rainforest Café memorial. “That was tough, that Anakin Skywalker turned to Darth Vader scene,” Moskovitz says with a laugh. “To be fair, Shannon did seem good.”
Miles claims he just wanted to be honest. “You can track back to him meeting Elle, where she sort of made him a little bit more open,” Moskovitz says. “But then he flies a little too close to the sun in that regard.”
The actor believes Miles is still trying to untangle his spark with Elle: “He doesn’t know if it’s meant to be a romantic relationship or a deep friendship, but there’s something very special about this person that he’s trying understand.”
Perhaps the same could be said for Dustin, whose “youthful mistakes,” as Looker terms them, include hooking up with Elle’s visiting friend Madison (Jessica Belkin) and not handling the principal investigation the way he and Elle agreed to.
“Elle drops a massive pink bomb into all of these people’s lives,” Looker says. “How were we meant to react to these things? Hold on for dear life.”
