Legally Blonde prequel Elle: Lexi Minetree’s first meeting with Reese Witherspoon was a surprise

The first time Lexi Minetree met Reese Witherspoon, she didn’t know she was about to come face-to-face with the original Elle Woods.

“It was probably helpful to not know until you realise you have to do a scene with her, and you then you poop your pants, so that’s fun,” Minetree recalled to The Nightly.

The actor, 25, has spent the past two years basically living as Elle Woods, Witherspoon’s iconic character from the 2001 movie Legally Blonde.

Minetree plays the younger, high school version of Elle in a new prequel series set six years before the would-be lawyer arrived at Harvard. In this, it’s 1995 and Elle has just been transported from sunny and bubbly Los Angeles to the rainy and grungy Seattle. The culture shock is real.

The series has Witherspoon on board as executive producer through her production company, Hello Sunshine, and, obviously, anyone donning Elle’s pink threads would need the Witherspoon tick of approval.

So, that meeting, the one Minetree didn’t know was about to take place, it was important.

“I was really scared, but she’s so nice and such a warm presence, and made it all very easy and comfortable for me,” Minetree said. “We ended up doing more of an acting exercise together, so it was a passing the torch of Elle Woods in a way.”

She obviously did something right, because Witherspoon was the one who broke the news to Minetree that she had the role.

“I felt every feeling known to man, simultaneously,” she said. “I was very excited, but also, I don’t know about you, but things don’t always hit me. The scope, the magnitude of things don’t hit necessarily right away. So when I was home later, ‘Ohmigod, holy sh-t, I’m Elle Woods, it’s crazy’.”

Minetree was only three months old when Legally Blonde was released in 2001, but she remembers being exposed to it when she was quite young. “Throughout the course of my life, it’s a kind of comfort movie, the more I’ve seen it, which is a lot now, the more I grow to love it,” she explained.

There were a lot of messages in the film she felt resonated, and what she wanted to carry through from that original iteration to her version was Elle’s confidence.

“Let’s be honest, there are not that many confident 16 year olds out there, at least not that I know, and in the movie, she is so confident. She walks into the bunny outfit and she’s the only one wearing a costume, and she’s looking around and she just owns it.

“It’s not a normal amount of confidence, I don’t think I would react that way. I would run and hide like Elle does (in the prequel series).”

Minetree is a relative newcomer to the business. Before Elle, she had a few credits in TV movies and her most notable appearance was on an episode of Law & Order: SVU. To go from relative obscurity to leading a series based on incredibly well-known and beloved intellectual property has been a whirlwind.

She has already shot a second season of Elle, which was filmed back-to-back with the first, and is now on a publicity tour taking her all over the world, including in Australia.

Once she finally gets a breather, one of the things she’s promised to is to dive deeper into US soap Days of our Lives.

Because of its 1995 setting, Elle is a cavalcade of pop cultural references from that era, especially the music – Minetree said that when she is at home, she likes to start the day with popping a CD in, as in, an actual physical disc (“I enjoy listening to the full arc of an album”).

But of all the 90s cultural accoutrements floating around in Elle, the thing she loved the most was that wild storyline of Marlena’s possession on Days of our Lives the character becomes obsessed with.

“I could not believe that Marlena’s possession was a thing,” Minetree said. “I went down a rabbit hole when the writers were pitching that. I was like, ‘This is a bit, surely this can’t be a real plot point of a show’.

“I love the idea that it was (Days of our Lives’) first supernatural plot. They were normal before and they’re like, ‘You know, this needs demons’. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”

She’s only seen a few episodes and snippets of the long-running and iconic soap, but that’s not where it’s going to stop.

“I haven’t had a life for two years because of filming, but once I get a life back, oh, Days of our Lives, I’m coming for you.”

Elle is streaming on Prime Video