Last year, speaking to The New York Times, Reese Witherspoon described herself as having two very distinct jobs. “[I’m] a creator and a person who understands the economics of creating,” she said, in that slightly soul-sapping parlance of a San Francisco tech guru. Witherspoon, a giant star of TV and film whose media company Hello Sunshine was reportedly valued at $900m when it was sold in 2021, then expanded on her ethos, which straddles art and commerce. “You’ve got to go where the audience is,” she said. She claimed Gen Z don’t go to the cinema (untrue, it turns out), and that most older people see a single movie a year with their kids. “[You can’t] lament the fact that they didn’t show up, or have what I call old school-itis … attention spans are shifting. They just are.”
“Going where the audience is”, then, means making more stuff like Elle, a Prime Video series that serves as a prequel to Legally Blonde, the classic 2001 comedy that not only turned Witherspoon into an enormously bankable A-lister but came to define a kind of feminism that still dominates much of social media today: Elle was kind, inclusive and unashamedly girly, while also smart and shrewd and goal-oriented. Her journey over the course of the film – from an undervalued California sorority girl who enrolls in Harvard Law School to win back her ex, only to find herself, and a high-powered career, in the process – has made Legally Blonde the ur-text for the #Girlboss/girl-dinner/Barbie-but-make-it-woke aesthetic of the Noughties to now.
