After years of anticipation and a highly publicized casting search for its star, Elle Season 1 is finally making its debut July 1 on Prime Video.
The series takes place six years before the events of the first Legally Blonde film, when a young Elle Woods (Lexi Minetree) learns that her parents are uprooting her thriving high school career in Bel-Air and moving the family to Seattle. Thrust into a world of grunge culture and classmates who are skeptical of her bubbly pink personality, Elle is forced to carve out a new path and build up her confidence to win over the school while staying true to herself.
Already the show has a huge vote of confidence from Prime Video, having just completed filming for Season 2 before the first season even airs. Reflecting on the journey so far of creating this character, Minetree said “It’s crazy and it’s truly a gift having gotten to do two seasons now before season one even comes out and I feel like I’ve grown so much as a person and gotten so close to the cast. It’s very weird to have this personal thing I’ve created finally being shared with the world but I hope everyone loves it just as much as we do.”
Playing Elle’s parents are June Diane Raphael (Weapons, Grace and Frankie) as Eva Woods and Tom Everett Scott (The Summer I Turned Pretty) as Wyatt Woods. Thinking back to her audition with Minetree, Raphael commented, “I had a chemistry read with her and walked in and felt like I’ve known her my whole life. We just held each other for a long time and then we started the audition. So I just knew it was going to be the two of us from the beginning.”
It wouldn’t be a ‘90s high school comedy without a classic love triangle, and we see Elle growing closer to both Dustin (Zac Looker) and Miles (Jacob Moskovitz) over the course of the season. “Dustin is one of the first characters to understand that there’s a lot more to Elle than maybe initially meets the eye,” said Looker. “He sees that maybe he was wrong to judge her based on her appearance and he sees her conviction and moral compass. And so I think him recognizing that is a part of why they connect early in the season.”
For showrunner Caroline Dries, it was a huge relief when she first saw Minetree’s audition and knew that they had finally found their Elle. “I thought thank God that we weren’t going to have to settle,” said Dries. “Lexi really is an undeniable Elle Woods in just the way she did her audition, and she really embraces the character off camera too. So we were very lucky to find her the way we did.”
All 8 episodes of Elle Season 1 will be streaming Wednesday, July 1 on Prime Video.
