The Verdict Is In: June Diane Raphael Is The Mom Elle Woods Deserved

For 25 years, we’ve known Elle Woods on the other side of adolescence. When we met the iconic character, she was Harvard-bound and bend-and-snap confident. And, as we saw over the course of two Legally Blonde movies, congenitally impossible to underestimate. But that sort of tenacity doesn’t just come out of thin air — strong women are so often an amalgamation of the strong women who came before us, a kaleidoscope of stories and lived experiences. Who, then, helped piece together the Elle we all know and love today?

Enter Eva Woods. In Elle, Prime Video’s new ‘90s-set prequel to Legally Blonde, June Diane Raphael plays Elle’s mom: an impossibly polished, sometimes overbearing, but relentlessly devoted mother who is (after her husband botches a nose job badly enough to force the family out of Bel-Air) reluctantly rebuilding her family’s picture-perfect life… in grunge-era Seattle.

For Raphael, who most of us came to adore as the glorious child-free workaholic Brianna in Grace and Frankie, it’s a swerve. In real life, she’s a proud mother of two sons. Yet here, she is playing the ultimate girl mom, drawing on her own late mother to do it (“a mom who was so deeply hilarious and funny and would make me laugh so hard”). The result is the kind of mother-daughter relationship you don’t see often in pop culture, one built on love that is occasionally misguided, sure, but deeply fierce.

We caught up with Raphael to talk about cast chemistry, revisiting the ‘90s, and the specific ache of realizing your kid might not need you the way they used to.

Scary Mommy: Elle Woods is basically a national treasure at this point. How did you step into the role of the woman who raised her?

June Diane Raphael: I feel like Elle Woods raised me, and so many women of my generation. I remember the mom being played beautifully in the movie, but she had such limited real estate — so in a way, it was great to have a blank slate to create this character from. I love the idea that every woman is made up of all these different women in her life who've helped her, challenged her, supported her, and loved her so hard. It's been an honor to play her mother.

There's such a beautiful mother-daughter story in this show, and one I'm really proud to be part of, because those representations can sometimes get a little strange in pop culture. There's competition, all sorts of weird stuff. In Elle, the relationship is really rooted in so much love and support. Even when Eva's doing the wrong thing, she still always has Elle's best interests at the forefront.

SM: I recently saw Legally Blonde back in theaters for its anniversary, and the audience was full of young women. How important was it to feel like you're passing the baton to the next generation of Elle Woods fans?

JDR: I think that so many moms and daughters will watch Elle together, which is really special. For women of my generation, my character kind of stands in for a lot of us because we're the same age. I was 21 when the movie came out, and it was so important for me at that time to see.

That basic theme of Legally Blonde of unapologetically being who you are, even when the world doesn't believe in you or underestimates you, and then that story around this woman who’s hyper-feminine and loves hair and makeup and clothes … and is still really smart — it's really simple in a way and yet was incredibly necessary at that time, and arguably just as important now. I can't wait for women of my generation to see it and share it with the younger women in their lives.

SM: This show is like a '90s time capsule. What was your favorite part of bringing that specific aesthetic to life?

JDR: Sara Byblow designed our costumes, and the clothes are so beautiful; I get to wear so much vintage Chanel and Versace. They're just stunning. One of the things I really love about the wardrobe is that Eva is always dressed to the nines. With the dawn of athleisure, I'm in workout clothes most of the day whether or not I'm actually working out, so I loved playing someone who's always dressed up, even for school drop-off.

Also, the Rolodex I use — where I get to spin it around and around and around, and there’s all these Post-its coming out of it — and the landlines with the big buttons, and all that … it's so tactile, the experience. There's something really satisfying about it.​

SM: Lexi Minetree is a newcomer stepping into Reese's shoes. What was it like building a mother-daughter shorthand with her?

JDR: I feel I didn't build it; it was always there. I met Lexi when I was auditioning for the role. They flew her to LA, and I had a meeting with her before we read any of the scenes. The feeling was really like, "I'm meeting you again, but not for the first time. It’s great to see you. We’ve known each other forever." It just felt so natural, so quickly.

Sometimes you really do have to build chemistry with another actor and get to know them. And for whatever reason — these things are guided by the big guy in the sky, I don't know — we just had that feeling right away … I love her dearly. She’s a very special person, and I'm blown away by how she stepped into this role. Her talent, of course, is one piece of it, and it’s a huge piece. Just showing up to do that with that amount of pressure and with that amount of eyeballs on this, it’s a lot. It’s a lot for someone my age. It’s a whole lot for someone her age. I’m really proud of her.

SM: She’s so convincing as Elle.

JDR: So convincing. At the same time, the connection between her and Reese is otherworldly. And it is her own Elle Woods, too. She’s pulled off a real magic trick here. I have to ask her how she did it, because it’s straight-up spooky.

SM: There's a whole world that women in Hollywood are building now, putting women into these roles and telling these stories. What's it like to be part of that with Reese?

JDR: It was very special. Reese came to Vancouver, where we were shooting the first season, and we had dinner and talked about her experience with the movie and motherhood. She'd just had a baby when she was shooting Legally Blonde, which kind of blew me away. I'm also a mom, traveling and working for the show and playing a mom, so there was a lot we connected on around that.

And I'll always say this about her: She’s built Hello Sunshine and this entire community-platform company around this idea of telling women’s stories — women who are complicated and real and funny and demented — and showing their full humanity. Working with her and the Hello Sunshine team, they really do walk the walk. They really are supporting all the women on our show. I mean, specifically me, who’s doing this job with children and schedules and trying to remain sane. I could not have felt more supported by all the people around Reese who made it possible. So that was cool to see that it’s not just a slogan for them; it’s absolutely how they run things.

SM: You're an incredible advocate for women yourself. You don’t shy away from using your voice, even writing a book encouraging women to run for office. And the roles you take are complex, dimensional women. Is that something you very consciously seek out? What's your hope for the message of your body of work?

JDR: It is something I seek out because I really love women. I find women to be endlessly fascinating and complicated. And for me, just comedically, there's something about women who are a little demented that I just respond to. This is really coming from a mom who was so deeply hilarious and funny and would make me laugh so hard; I found women to always just be funny, to always have something to say that I was interested in listening to.

The roles I'm attracted to are complicated women who don't always do the right thing. Sometimes they're quite wrong, in fact. But my hope is that by showing all the sides of women, we ultimately create more space for them in real life. It's one of the reasons I loved Grace and Frankie so much: There’s a show about two women in their late 70s who are hilarious and beautiful and sexual and smart and starting a business, doing all these things we often just don't let women do. We don't let ourselves see women that way.

SM: And in Elle, we get to see you at the tricky stage of mothering a teenager...

JDR: Stepping into this role, this is one of the first times I've really played a mom. Brianna in Grace and Frankie was famously childless, which was also really important for me to do. But I'm loving the experience of sharing this part of me — the motherhood part — which is so rich with humor, but also just humanity and sharing the difficult moments of, "Oh, I do know what it is to have a child who's getting older."

All of a sudden, like Eva, you're not quite sure how that's hitting you. There's grief in that, and there's fear in that, and do they need you anymore? And if you're not a mom anymore, then what are you? All of these feelings are, as an actor, such fertile areas to play in.

To your point about empowering women, sometimes these words are used so often that we forget what they mean. The language is like, “Oh yeah, this is a show that empowers women, empowers young girls,” but what does it actually mean? And I do think Legally Blonde is such a great example: There's real data about how many women went to law school after seeing Elle Woods do it. That's real. We needed to see that.

I needed to see that certainly, too — that you could, like Reese, be really feminine and do big physical comedy and play a giant character who's super-funny but also real, and who we care about and we’re rooting for. All of those dimensions are so important to see. And ultimately, with women, we so often just narrow the box.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.