Reese Witherspoon Says She Was Once Chosen as Jury Duty Foreman Due to ‘Legally Blonde’ Role

Reese Witherspoon Says She Was Once Chosen as Jury Duty Foreman Due to ‘Legally Blonde’ Role

Reese Witherspoon may have pretended to go to law school in Legally Blonde, but she was surprised to learn that some thought she actually did study that.

While appearing on The Graham Norton Show, Witherspoon reflected on having to do jury duty years after the 2001 film’s release.

“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.’ They picked me for a long trial, y’all. It was probably two weeks.”

When Witherspoon’s You’re Cordially Invited co-star Will Ferrell, who was also on the show, teased that two weeks wasn’t “that long” the actress reiterated, “It was two solid weeks, every day going in.”

The case centered on a dog biting incident in which a woman sued another dog owner because her dog bit her during a dog fight.

However, things took an interesting turn when Witherspoon explained that she was singled out in the jury group: “And then 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.’ Me!”

After asking why she was being chosen, Witherspoon recalled, “They were like, ‘You went to law school.’”

Realizing that they were mistaken because her Elle Woods persona goes to Harvard Law School, Witherspoon continued to recall, “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 but they fully made me the foreman and I started realizing … people don’t know much about the law.”

Despite initially not wanting to go, Witherspoon encouraged everyone to attend jury duty because “bad stuff goes down in there.”

When Ferrell asked if the dog was found guilty or not, Witherspoon explained the whole case reminding everyone to not “put your hand in a dog fight.”

After playing Elle Woods 2001’s Legally Blonde, Witherspoon reprised the role for the 2003 sequel Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde. Amazon’s Prime Video announced an Elle Woods prequel series. Witherspoon will executive produce via her Hello Sunshine banner along with series creator and showrunner Laura Kittrell, Hello Sunshine’s Lauren Neustadter and Lauren Kisilevsky, and Marc Platt, producer of the Legally Blonde films.