Reese Witherspoon was once made to step up while serving on a jury — all because of “Legally Blonde.”
In a recent appearance on “The Graham Norton Show,” the actor recalled being mistaken for a real lawyer by her fellow jurors because of her portrayal of Elle Woods.
“Listen, I did not want to do jury duty,” Witherspoon said. “But I remember… it was probably seven years after ‘Legally Blonde,’ I got called for jury duty and it was in Beverly Hills. I thought, ‘Surely they’re not gonna pick me.’”
She was wrong.
“They picked me for a long trial, y’all. It was probably two weeks,” Witherspoon said, as “You’re Cordially Invited” costar Will Ferrell poked fun at the length of time. “It was two solid weeks every day going in. It was a dog bite case.”
She said that the trial went to deliberation, and this is when she found out that people thought she went to law school.
“We went to deliberation and so at the very end they say, ‘OK, well somebody in this group has to be the foreman.’ And they all unanimously are like, ‘Her,’” she said. “Me! Me?”
When she asked the jurors why they picked her, she said, “They were like, ‘You went to law school.’ I was like, ‘Y’all this is really upsetting. I definitely did not go to law school, I didn’t finish college.’”
“I played a lawyer in a movie once,” she said. “But they fully made me the foreman. And I started realizing, people don’t know much about the law.”
Witherspoon portrayed sorority-turned-law-student Elle Woods in the 2001 film “Legally Blonde.” She reprised the role in the 2003 sequel “Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde,” in which Elle heads to Washington D.C. to fight for animal rights.
Talks about Witherspoon once again becoming the pink-obsessed Elle in a third film have been going on for years.
“I think Reese has been working over the years, trying to put something together, and Reese is just so smart. She’s not just going to do a Part 3,” Luke Wilson, who portrayed Elle’s love interest Emmett Richmond, told TODAY.com in October about a third installment.
In May of 2024, however, Witherspoon dressed as Elle to confirm that a “Legally Blonde” prequel series was in the works for Amazon Prime Video.
“Before she became the most famous Gemini vegetarian to graduate from Harvard Law, she was just a regular ‘90s high school girl. And all of you are going to get to know her, next year on @primevideo ✨ I’M SO EXCITED!” Witherspoon captioned her video. The show is expected to be released later this year.
