When Reese Witherspoon‘s Elle Woods returns to the big screen for “Legally Blonde 3,” Jennifer Coolidge’s Paulette will be bending and snapping right beside her. On Feb. 4, Witherspoon made it clear in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that the highly anticipated threequel will only happen if Coolidge is part of the cast. Now, the actor’s former costar has responded to let her know she’s ready to bring Paulette back for the franchise’s third film.
“Of course, I would be on board,” Coolidge told Extra on Feb. 5. “I’ve been hearing about it for a long time… Maybe it is really is happening at this point. I would love to do it. I would absolutely love to do ‘Legally Blonde 3.'”
Luckily, “Legally Blonde 3” is, indeed, still happening – it just keeps getting delayed. Witherspoon first announced that the new movie was in development on June 7, 2018. Originally, MGM shared in a tweet that “Legally Blonde 3” would hit theaters on Valentine’s Day 2020. That date got pushed back to May 2022. Now, there’s no new set release date, but the movie is still in the works.
While the cast hasn’t reunited to film anything yet, they have gathered to talk about the movie. “I think I know as much as you all, but we did have a Zoom-call get-together last summer where the whole cast – Jennifer [Coolidge], Matthew [Davis], Selma [Blair] – all got together and talked, so it really was great to see everybody,” said Luke Wilson, who plays Emmett, Elle’s partner, in an August 2022 interview on “Good Morning America.” “Reese is such a sharp individual, I think she’s probably just waiting for the script to be right and the time to be right. It’ll be really fun to make another movie.”
In July of that same year, Witherspoon told USA Today that she’s taking her time on the script and hopes it will be worth it in the end. “I’m still hoping that ‘Legally Blonde 3’ is gonna come together in the right way,” she said. “It’s just like ‘Top Gun’ – they waited a long time to make another version of that movie, and I loved the nostalgia piece they incorporated in it. So definitely that gave us a lot of inspiration about what we would want to do with Elle Woods and make sure that we had all those same touchstones that mattered to people [back] then. I feel like these characters are my friends, so I safeguard them,” she added. “I would never make the subpar, mediocre version of their story.”
Mindy Kaling, who’s been tasked with writing the third movie’s script alongside “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” creator Dan Goor, has also emphasized the fact that the team is set on making sure they get the movie right, no matter how long it takes. She told Time in March 2022 that the “Legally Blonde 3” screenplay isn’t ready but that they’re digging deep to make sure it’s perfect. “What is Elle Woods like at 42?” Kaling asked. “Does she end up becoming all the things she wanted? How does that personality manifest in a grown woman? Has she become more cynical? Her brightness and her cheerfulness really worked when she was 22, but how has life changed her perspective on things?”
Kaling also shared that watching the “Sex and the City” reboot, “And Just Like That,” made her even more aware of how hard it is to update Elle for a modern era. “The hardest thing about this project is trying to figure that out in an authentic way,” she said. “Honestly, watching ‘And Just Like That’ and how they took a character from 18 years ago and how the character was now – we want to make sure that Elle Woods is not paying penance for existing in the year 2022.”
We can’t wait to see how Elle’s story has evolved since the 2003 sequel, “Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde.” Read ahead to find out everything else we know about “Legally Blonde 3” so far, including the creative team.