“It was then when I was like, ‘Ah, I like my character and I know who he is.’”
Photo: Kimberley French/Prime
There comes a point in Elle, Amazon’s Legally Blonde prequel series that essentially has the plot of Frasier, when everything unlocks for our leading lady’s father. It’s near the end of episode three, and Wyatt (Tom Everett Scott) and Eva (June Diane Raphael) are in the midst of hosting their first soirée as new city transplants. They’ve absconded from Bel Air to Seattle after Wyatt botched a nose job for a high-profile client, and the couple — well, mostly Eva — is learning that her prowess as a host, which “puts Kathy Hilton to shame,” is going unappreciated. The guests are requesting beer. They crave bread. They don’t even think the Champagne is real. Eva scurries off to buy as many baguettes as she can to rectify the situation, giving our dear Wyatt his marquee moment: When she returns, he’s on a guitar performing Oasis’s “Wonderwall” to dozens of ecstatic guests, who would rather pledge their allegiance to Britpop than eat another Dr. Seussian amuse-bouche. “She gives up, and I give the people what they want, which is a sing-along,” Scott says. “It could have been ‘Black,’ by Pearl Jam, or in that grunge world, but ‘Wonderwall’ is just perfect.”
The scene, which is played earnestly and runs a tad shorter in length than the Kens’ Barbie serenade to Matchbox 20, was always scripted to include Oasis’s most popular song. “It made me laugh out loud when I first read it,” Scott recalls. “It was just a really funny beat. Then the next thought I had was, Oh shit, I have to learn ‘Wonderwall.’”
Despite retaining a bit of music knowledge from his well-loved That Thing You Do! role as a fictional band’s drummer, all Scott was capable of doing for Elle was strumming the instrument. “I’m not a guitar player. I have way too much respect for real musicians to ever say that I am one,” he says. “I’m not the guy you want backing you up on guitar in a real situation.” Elle’s music supervisor hired an instructor to walk him through how to convincingly play the chords on set, which were later overdubbed by a professional guitarist. Then he had to learn how to belt it like the parka god before him. “I was singing it all the time in my apartment. My neighbors must have thought, This guy is obsessed with ‘Wonderwall,’” he says. “One of my best friends tried to teach me how to sing it properly. I was giving it a three-note kind of fall. And he said, ‘No, it’s two notes. It sounds better. That’s what Liam does.’ And I was like, ‘Got it. Noted. I’m going to nail this.’”
Put the lighters up, bruv.
Photo: Prime
Scott had a lot of nerves on the actual filming day. There were a few tricky camera shots he had to contend with — the scene intersplices after Elle, his character’s daughter, performs karaoke to No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” — that made it more technical than he would’ve liked. “I wasn’t feeling the flow of just playing,” he recalls. “It was a little bit like, ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh.’ And it’s in front of however many background extras were there, so it was nerve-racking. But I got to do it a bunch of times.”
Name-checking Sandra Hüller’s pivotal Harry Styles karaoke scene in Project Hail Mary, Scott also knows that these moments, however small they seem, can pack a lot of weight in the overall narrative. “It was then when I was like, ‘Ah, I like my character and I know who he is,’” he says. “This is based on a character that people sort of know from Legally Blonde but barely. The dad is in one scene and has a couple lines. It’s not that you know who that character is.” The “Wonderwall” of it all gave him the licence to fully flesh out this plastic surgeon. “It showed me that he’s goofy, confident, and can lead a sing-along,” he adds. “That’s a special kind of confidence. It endeared me to Wyatt. I’d love to be the person who could do that. I’m a little too shy. I think that’s why I’m an actor. I get to be these other people and not have to be myself.”
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