The creative team behind Elle have a message for those concerned about the Legally Blonde prequel.
During an exclusive interview with Us Weekly, showrunners Laura Kittrell, Caroline Dries and executive producer Lauren Neustadter weighed in on the initial concerns on social media about reviving the fictional Elle Woods as a teenager.
“Nobody was worried about it more than us,” Kittrell recalled about the strong online reaction. “That is definitely what kept us up at night.”
The team had a vision for how to keep their version grounded.
“We always went back to tone. We always went back to what we emotionally connected to about the movie — just as fans of the movie — and making sure that we had those things down perfectly,” Kittrell continued. “Then once we were able to firmly establish that, we were getting excited about how we have new characters that we get to introduce to the world and still make it feel like its own thing.”
She continued: “We tried really hard to strike a balance of if you’re a fan of the movie, you’re going to watch this and get what you want as a fan of the movie. If you have never watched this movie in your life or even heard of it, you will also totally find something to connect to in it.”
Based on Amanda Brown‘s novel, the 2001 movie Legally Blonde introduced Us to Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon), a sorority girl who attempted to win back her ex-boyfriend Warner (Matthew Davis) by getting a degree at Harvard Law School. Luke Wilson, Selma Blair, Victor Garber and Jennifer Coolidge rounded out the cast, with a second movie following two years later.
While news broke in 2018 that Witherspoon, 50, had teamed up with Mindy Kaling for Legally Blonde 3, there has been no real update since. Instead, Prime Video announced a prequel focused on Elle’s move from Los Angeles to Seattle when she was in high school.
“We learn about the life experiences that shaped her into the iconic young woman we came to know and love in the first Legally Blonde film,” the official synopsis for the new series reads. “In other words, get ready for the teen years of this legendary lawyer’s story.”
With Lexi Minetree taking on the role as teen Elle, the series stars June Diane Raphael and Tom Everett Scott as Elle’s parents. Chandler Kinney, Gabrielle Policano and Jacob Moskovitz were also announced as series regulars alongside Zac Looker, Jessica Belkin, Amy Pietz and more. (James Van Der Beek also joined the cast for what would become his final TV role before his death.)
“We really wanted to honor the movie. We are all fans,” Neustadter shared with Us. “We always think about the fans and I think staying really tightly tied to that original movie was an incredibly important thing and always really our north star.”
Kittrell, meanwhile, noted how the writers’ room “wanted to add something else to the canon and not create our own new canon.”
While planning ahead for the show, Dries recalled how important it was to “maintain the fun tone of the movie,” adding, “It was about keeping the world of Elle feeling heightened but the world kind of feeling grounded around her. But [it is] also sustaining that for eight episodes. So for eight hours of TV, you can’t be up here the whole time. It’s really about finding these emotional stories that bring us to an emotional bottom for all the characters and finding the balance so we get without getting overly sentimental. The movie does a great job of that but it’s two hours and now you got to stretch that into eight hours.”
Elle is streaming on Prime Video now.
