Legally Blonde Prequel: Elle Star Lexi Minetree on Becoming Teenage Elle Woods

“I’m a bit woo-woo,” she warns with a laugh. “I don’t know if it was the universe or a connection to this character, but I knew who she was. I saw a lot of myself in her.” To make her case to the casting directors, Minetree recorded her own version of Elle Woods’s iconic Harvard admissions video essay in Legally Blonde, complete with warm tub and string bikini. “I have to tell you, when I saw Lexi Minetree in her video, it stopped me,” an emotional Witherspoon told the crowd at a fan event earlier this month. “It took my breath away.”

Created by Laura Kittrell (previously a co-producer on Insecure), who serves as co-showrunner alongside Caroline Dries, the Legally Blonde prequel follows a pre-Harvard Elle Woods in 1995. That’s the year Elle and her parents, Eva (June Diane Raphael) and Wyatt (Tom Everett Scott), are forced to move to Seattle when a client’s botched nose job at Wyatt’s plastic surgery practice forces the family into a Beverly Hills 90210 version of witness protection. Elle was popular in her radiant, upbeat Bel-Air bubble, but a total outcast among the Nirvana-loving, grunge-wearing student body at her fresh high school in downcast Seattle, “the city God and Gucci forgot,” says Elle.

Just as Elle must learn the language of her fresh constituency, Minetree brushed up on all things Legally Blonde after she was cast, watching the original film upwards of 150 times to study Witherspoon’s voice and mannerisms. She also examined the way dumb-blonde tropes from the early 2000s, when Paris Hilton and Britney Spears were fixtures of the tabloid circuit, had influenced her perception of Elle. “I had this conception about Elle that a lot of people still have—this blonde sorority girl bimbo who follows a guy to Harvard and then learns to be smart and hardworking,” says Minetree. And that’s the exact point the movie is making. “The more I watched it, the more I realized she was confident in herself the entire movie. It was everyone else who was getting to her level.”

Minetree has adopted Elle’s positive view of herself, especially considering that the character has been revived several times since the film’s release, first in the 2003 sequel, Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde, then a Broadway musical in 2007, the direct-to-video Legally Blondes in 2009, and finally, an MTV reality series about casting the replacement for Laura Bell Bundy, who originated the role of Elle Woods onstage. “Remakes [and] prequels make people nervous—as they should,” says Minetree. “Because it’s a story that is very precious to people.” But if those 100-plus rewatches of Legally Blonde taught her anything, it’s that “we let other people’s opinions pave the way for what we think we’re capable of,” says the actor. “Something I’ve learned from Elle is that you first have to believe you can for you to actually be able to do it.”