I ask actress June Diane Raphael, who currently plays Elle Woods’ mother in the Legally Blonde prequel series Elle and has played fan-favorite characters in comedies like Grace and Frankie and Parks and Recreation, to indulge me in an exercise.
Imagine I am on my deathbed, I tell her, and you can’t let this poor little gay man die without telling him the absolute best story you have about your Grace and Frankie co-stars, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. Speaking to me on the new episode of Obsessed: The Podcast, boy, did Raphael oblige.
Admitting that she’s never told this anecdote publicly before, Raphael started recreating the hilarious experience of watching the acting legends on set together between takes, constantly using the voice-to-text feature on their cell phones.
“Just a fully delivered full voice,” Raphael says, mimicking the conversations. “‘Tell Audrey that I can’t make it on Wednesday, period.’ In full paragraphs.’ If you want to ask her if she can reschedule to Thursday, I am open to that period. But would that work for her question mark?’ So it was like anything from that to also, like, ‘My makeup artist of 30 years is dead period. Send.’ Just hearing the craziest things.”
Raphael is a font of great stories, and is so good at telling them that, by the time we finished our conversation, she had 99 percent convinced me that, like her, I should dye my hair blonde.
The topic came up naturally—how ironic—during our discussion of Elle, the new Prime Video series that imagines what Reese Witherspoon’s character, Elle Woods, was like as a teenager, before Harvard law, before the Playboy bunny outfit, before successfully defending Ali Larter against murder charges by calling out Linda Cardellini’s false perm alibi…and before anybody was bending and snapping or quipping, “What? Like it’s hard?”
The series is an origin story, of sorts, for the Elle we know and love from the Legally Blonde films. If you assumed she had a privileged teen experience as the most popular girl at a Beverly Hills high school, Elle offers a different take: the Woods family was forced to move to Seattle after losing all their money and status, where, in the Nirvana-soundtracked, flannel-outfitted grunge era of the ’90s, Elle was a bullied, hot-pink fish out of water.
Fans of the films have, let’s say…opinions about this backstory, a discourse that Raphael welcomes.
“Anybody talking about it is a good thing,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like franchises or world-building has been reserved for very male-centered, hetero stories like the Spider-Mans and the this-and-the-that. I know that there’s so much fan discourse and feelings being hurt about, ‘What did they do to my Spider-Man? What did they do to my Indiana Jones? What did they do to the Avengers?’ And is it law? Is it canon?”
Why can’t we have those conversations about a female-centered franchise like Legally Blonde? Lexi Minetree, who plays Elle in the series, said something Raphael loves and repeats: “If only we had to learn a lesson once in our lives.”
“Seeing the reaction around taking a beloved female character and doing world-building around her, I’m like, let’s all talk about it, because that is usually reserved for the superheroes, for the Indiana Jones, for the Tom Clancy novels, for all of that,” she adds. “They get to build out worlds, and we usually just have one. And so for me, I’m excited that that there’s world building going around, going on with Elle Woods.”
It makes sense that Raphael is so eloquent talking about the series and the Elle Woods lore. Playing Elle’s mom, she is so good in the show. When I attended the show’s New York City premiere, the major talking point at the reception afterward was how impressive her performance is, dishing out the comedy about a rich Los Angeles socialite that audiences want from that kind of character, but infusing her with a remarkable amount of empathy and introspection about her lifestyle and how she’s judged.
Raphael has a unique perspective on that complicated relationship with perception.
As we talk about in the interview, she loves being blonde. She also noticed how, after years of stealing small scenes in movies or dropping in for guest roles on sitcoms, her career completely changed when she dyed her hair from her natural brunette—something that, of course, stirs up some feelings. Blondes have more fun, sure. But, apparently, they also get more work.
“This was really a business decision for me where I was like, ‘Oh, f---. Of course.’ I would get through all the women and all of the development executives, etc., and get very close to getting the part. And then at the end of the day, it was always a man deciding, and they see me and then they see a blond actress, and I would always lose out,” she says.
She thought, if it’s just the color of hair that’s the deciding factor so many times, then she’d dye it.
“That’s the truth of the matter. I think so many of those standards, they’re set so that we can never actually reach them. That’s why I made the decision. I haven’t gone back. I guess you’ll know I’ve really made it in my career and I feel really comfortable if I go back to being a brunette.”
As she laughs at herself, I confess to her that I’ve long wanted to experience, as she also talks about, how people perceive but also treat you differently when you have blonde hair. The issue, however—and she is aware of this unique conundrum—is that when gay men my age dye their hair blonde, everyone in their lives assumes they’re going through some mental crisis.
But maybe I just want to try out being blonde!
“You know what I feel? What I tell my girls: Do you want to get bangs? You want to go f---ing get your boobs done? Go do it. We’ve got one go-round in this skin suit. You know what I mean? This is not a renewable resource. We have one shot. So, yeah, I think you should do it.”
So if next time you tune into Obsessed: The Podcast and see that I have blonde hair, don’t be alarmed. I am not mentally ill. I just talked to June Diane Raphael.
Watch the full interview with June Diane Raphael here, or listen where you get your podcasts.
