Please Don't Make Young Elle Woods "Regular"

She grew up across the street from Aaron Spelling, for goodness sake.

I have a love/hate relationship with the concept of reboots. On the one hand, my three favorite television shows of all time — Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sex and the City and The Comeback — have all been (or will be) rebooted in some form to varying degrees of success. And in every instance, I’ve levitated at the chance to see three of my favorite characters (Buffy Summers, Carrie Bradshaw and Valerie Cherish) back on my screen. On the other hand, reboots seldom justify their necessity and more often than not reveal themselves as the cash grabs they too often were conceived to be. But as the most hyperbolic ass brand ambassador ass person alive, sometimes I can’t help but relent to the industry’s most tried machination. Which brings me to the Legally Blonde prequel series.

Back in June 2018, Amazon MGM Studios tweeted (and never deleted): “Back in Pink in 2020! #LegallyBlonde3.” In October 2020, a follow-up tweet was issued: ”Elle Woods is back! Legally Blonde 3 coming May 2022. We rest our case.” In May 2019, Reese Witherspoon gave an update saying she was “having a great time working on it.” A year later, in May 2020, Mindy Kaling and Goor were announced as the scribes of the new film. In the fall of 2023, Kaling provided an update on the delays, saying that they are taking their time to get it right because “Elle Woods is like Reese’s Avengers character, and people feel so passionately about this."

In April 2024, Deadline reported that a Legally Blonde spinoff series was being produced with Witherspoon's production company, Hello Sunshine, and Amazon MGM studios, the studio behind the originally announced third film. They announced that the series was being written by Gossip Girl developers/executive producers Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage. They also indicated that the studio is looking to further expand the Legally Blonde TV universe with a potential second spinoff series, “which is still in preliminary, idea stages.”

Then, at the Amazon upfronts a month later, Witherspoon took to the stage to fill in some long-awaited details about the show. “I had this crazy idea that the world might want to know the origin story of Elle Woods,” she told the crowd.

“We are going back to high school with Elle! Before she became the most famous gemini vegetarian to graduate from Harvard Law School, she was just a regular, 90s high school girl.”

Last month, Witherspoon shared that it was the Netflix series Wednesday that inspired what appears to be a pivot from Legally Blonde 3 to a Legally Blonde prequel series. “I saw that Wednesday Addams show and I was like, 'Oh!'” she told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show.

“She was in high school. I loved it, I watched every episode, I thought it was amazing. And I was like, 'We should do Elle Woods in high school because I wanted to see who she was before college, before law school. And I started having all these ideas and these amazing writers came up with a great pitch and now Amazon is making the show and it’s called Elle.”

And just last week, Witherspoon revealed that actress Lexi Minetree had been cast as young Elle with a video on Instagram showing her learning the news.

reesewitherspoon

A post shared by @reesewitherspoon

It’s unclear if Witherspoon will appear in the show in any capacity or if anyone from either film (notably Jennifer Coolidge) would appear. It being a prequel series means likely not, but one never knows in a landscape that can often find ways to bring familiar faces into the fold. I’m mildly excited at the idea of building out the Legally Blonde-averse. There’s enough concept to give it some edges but also adequate runway for interpretation. While we could get Young Warner, Young Margot and Young Serena (played in the film version by Matthew Davis, Jessica Cauffiel and Alanna Ubach, respectively) there’s plenty of opportunity for new characters for Elle to befriend and to quarrel with.

But there was something Witherspoon said on that Tonight Show stage that got caught in my teeth. She described young Elle as “just a regular, 90s high school girl.” Just a regular, 90s high school? What is this, My So Called Life? The Elle that we meet in Legally Blonde is exactly not that — which is why the film, a coming-of-age in a sense, ultimately works. One of the first things Elle says is that she’s got to go shopping. We see a Prada bag near her door and she’s wearing a Tiffany necklace. And when the shopkeeper a scene later mistakes her “as a dumb blonde with daddy’s plastic,” she is correct in identifying Elle’s wealth, which immediately separates her from the “regular girls.” In fact, so much of Elle’s essence comes from the fact that she’s born of privilege and exists within a bubble. Her redeeming quality, and that which separates her from her peers, is her intellect.

It is clear from one of Elle’s early memorable lines — ”It's impossible to use a half loop topstitching on low-viscosity rayon. It would snag the fabric." — that she’s got an intelligence that many disregard (like her parents). This could provide room for inspection in a prequel series in exploring Elle constantly being undervalued and not taken seriously. But to frame her as a regular girl is to deny a central aspect of Elle’s identity: her privilege. “I grew up in Bel Air, Warner” she tells Warner in the film. “Across the street from Aaron Spelling.” We soon after learn that she was first runner-up at the Miss Hawaiian Tropics Contest. I want young Elle to retain this quality, to be a 1%-er with a heart akin to the Glinda we see emerge in Wicked.

Please, Reese Witherspoon (said with respect and admiration), don’t make Elle Woods normal! Reheat the nachos you created the recipe for and make our girl sparkle!