Reese Witherspoon is putting her fictional law degree to use.
During a recent appearance on “The Graham Norton Show,” the 48-year-old “Big Little Lies” actress shared that she was once voted into a position of power while serving on a jury, after she portrayed a lawyer in one of her movies.
“Well listen, I did not want to do jury duty,” Witherspoon said on the show. “But I remember it was after ‘Legally Blonde.’ It was probably like 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.’ They picked me for a long trial, y’all. It was probably two weeks. I was on the jury.”
She went on to explain that over the course of the two weeks, she got “very invested in this case,” which she shared was a very clear “dog bite case.”
REESE WITHERSPOON ‘FOUND’ HER VOICE AS A SINGLE MOTHER: ‘NO ONE’S COMING TO HELP’
At the end of the trial, the jury “went to deliberation” and when it came time to elect a foreman, Witherspoon shared “they all unanimously are like, ‘Her,'” while pointing at herself. She shared the most distressing part was when she asked them why they chose her, and they said, “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,’” she said. “I played a lawyer in a movie once, but they fully made me the foreman and I started realizing people don’t know much about the law.”
Witherspoon famously played the character of Elle Woods, in the 2001 movie “Legally Blonde,” portraying a young woman who applies and gets into Harvard Law School in order to win back her boyfriend, only to realize she has the potential to be a high-powered attorney.
She reprised the role in the 2003 sequel, “Legally Blonde: Red, White & Blonde,” and later produced, but did not star in, “Legally Blondes” in 2009.
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In June 2018, Witherspoon shared a video of herself recreating a scene from the first film on social media, announcing a third film is in the works. Not much is known about the movie’s plot, or which members of the cast will be returning, but Witherspoon ensures she is committed to doing the character justice.
“They waited a long time to make another version of that movie, and I loved the nostalgia piece they incorporated in it,” she told Entertainment Tonight in July 2022. “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.”
She continued: “I feel like these characters are my friends, so I safeguard them. I would never make the subpar, mediocre version of their story.”
The actress was on the British talk show with actor Will Ferrell, who she stars with in the new Amazon Prime movie, “You’re Cordially Invited.” In the film, the two play characters who arrive to a venue to attend two separate weddings and begin to feud when they find out the venue double booked them.
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“There are a lot of wedding movies,” Ferrell told The Hollywood Reporter in January about the film, “but this was just really interesting and funny that it’s two weddings booked on the same day at a destination we can’t escape, we can’t run away… It’s a place that has a lot of nostalgia and meaning for both of our characters, and that sets up the stakes where we’re willing to basically rip each other’s heads up to defend the turf.”
