You wouldn’t think Reese Witherspoon‘s chipper attorney Elle Woods and Tom Cruise‘s steely Pete “Maverick” Mitchell had much in common, but you’d be wrong.
In a new interview with USA Today, Witherspoon says the long-in-development third Legally Blonde film might owe a debt to Cruise’s biggest-ever hit, Top Gun: Maverick, which flew into theaters 36 years after the original.
“I’m still hoping that Legally Blonde 3 is gonna come together in the right way,” Witherspoon tells the publication. “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.”
Reese adds, “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,” says the Oscar and Emmy-winning actress and producer. “I would never make the subpar, mediocre version of their story.”
Mindy Kaling is co-writing the third film, which will succeed 2003’s Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde.