NEW YORK – To audition to play the teenage Elle Woods, heroine of Prime Video’s prequel series to Legally Blonde, Lexi Minetree put on a pink bikini and reclined in a hot tub. Then the fun began.

Inspired by a scene from the 2001 movie, in which a swimsuit-clad Elle (Reese Witherspoon) submits a video application to Harvard Law School, Minetree lists her own qualifications: staying fit (she hoisted two-pound weights), learning new, detail-oriented skills (she crocheted on camera) and juggling her various interests (she juggled limes – “I’m a hobby collector,” she said).

“It was absolutely ridiculous,” Minetree said of her audition tape. “But in the best way – in Elle’s way, because she is ridiculous, because she doesn’t care about being cringy. She just is herself and owns it, which I love.”

And it worked. Minetree, now 25, a little-known American actress from the suburbs of Atlanta, landed the high-profile starring role in Elle.

“When I saw her tape, I was like, are we the same person?” Hollywood star Witherspoon, who conceived the series and executive produced it, said in a video with her plucky-chinned look-alike.

Minetree radiates Elle vibes in other ways too – what Lauren Neustadter, an executive producer of the series, called “the combination of being incredibly diligent and incredibly optimistic”.

Those qualities stretch far. The Legally Blonde universe already spans the original 2001 novel, two movie sequels (2003 and 2009) and a Broadway musical.

In the quarter century since Elle Woods appeared as a thoroughly accessorised, preternaturally confident sorority girl who battles blonde stereotypes and a rotten former boyfriend to propel herself to the top of her law school class, the character has become a huge feminist icon.

“What, like it’s hard?” might as well be embroidered on the backpacks of every overachieving co-ed. (And there are a lot of them in Elle’s wake; Witherspoon has said that women – who now...