It’s Lexi Minetree’s Elle World

Elle, the television series prequel to Legally Blonde, premieres on Prime Video on July 1. Hard not to be cranky with Amazon/Prime Video right now, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

First, we must take notice of the “Elle World” event hosted in New York to celebrate the show over the weekend. It brought out not only the stars of the new series but also reunited the stars of Legally Blonde, including Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Coolidge, who wore a leopard print caftan. Because of COURSE she did.

Have you ever seen Jennifer Coolidge’s house in New Orleans? She owns a mansion in the lower Garden District, where she hosts a fabled Halloween party every year. You can see photos here. Interiors from her home were also used in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled. The LEVEL of TASTE you must POSSESS in order for Sofia Coppola to call you up and ask to borrow your actual home, where you live, with all your stuff, for interiors for her historical drama is incredible. Literally the list is “the actual Palace of Versailles” and “Jennifer Coolidge’s house”.

Back to Elle, it’s set in 1995 (the Clueless era, does this mean Elle Woods and Cher Horowitz crossed paths?) and is about Elle moving to Seattle at the height of grunge. Lainey also locked into the Clueless comparison with the mid-Nineties setting. Does anyone else remember the Clueless TV series? Did I hallucinate that?

Lexi Minetree stars as the young(er) Elle, and this is her breakout role following years of work in shorts and TV movies. She was cast last year following an extensive search and then Reese Witherspoon wound her up in a vaguely Punk’d style video in which you can see Minetree bracing for a broken heart. This feels just a touch mean, if only because auditioning is such a brutal process and actors have to achieve such a precise balance of confidence and resilience to continually try and be rejected. I don’t know, maybe I’m being too crusty. Maybe this is actually really sweet? Mostly I’m just thinking about how much Minetree obviously wanted it and was visibly bracing for a broken heart.

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Another fun Lexi Minetree fact is that she is an alumna of the University of Southern California, which is where they filmed Legally Blonde (even though the university would not let the film use USC branding in the film because of “sorority stereotypes”. Having gone to USC in the early 2000s…the stereotypes were mostly correct). And before anyone yells at me, yes, I know they also filmed at UCLA.

Anyway, Lexi Minetree looks adorable, it’s always good to see Jennifer Coolidge and I really want to go to her annual Halloween party, reject the passage of time, and, finally, let’s talk about Amazon and what they’re up to…

Coming up next.