June Diane Raphael Is Not Going to Choose Between Feminine and Funny

Ten years ago, June Diane Raphael — a lifelong brunette — was struggling with auditions. She was constantly losing roles in the final round, often to her own friends. Eventually, she hit her breaking point and decided to do something drastic: “I was like, well fuck, I’ll just dye my hair blonde and see if that’s anything.” It worked. Raphael landed roles on prestige projects like Veep and Curb Your Enthusiasm, in the blockbuster studio comedy Blockers, and Netflix’s landmark Grace and Frankie. “It’s hard to know if it was because I just didn’t give a fuck anymore, but I did find I was booking so much more,” she says.

And now, Raphael is one of the stars of Elle, the latest installment in the Legally Blonde universe. The actress, 46, plays Eva Woods, mother to the titular Elle Woods, in the Prime Video series that follows the family as they struggle to assimilate after a move from Los Angeles to the notably peroxide-free ’90s-grunge-era Seattle. The role came to Raphael thanks to a connection forged in 2013 (during her brunette era); she’d filmed a pilot for an American reboot of the Sharon Horgan series Pulling, alongside Jenny Slate and Kristen Schaal, and hit it off with director Jason Moore. The two stayed in touch, and in early 2025 he sent her a text asking her to audition for the Legally Blonde prequel. The next day, she had the scripts for all eight episodes of the first season.

“I hadn’t seen a show like this since Gilmore Girls,” says Raphael. “It was a mother-daughter story that was loving and supportive, and without any of that weird competition. I was like, I would die to do this.”

Over the next week, Raphael read with Moore, auditioned with Lexi Minetree (the newcomer who plays Elle Woods), officially got the job and moved to Vancouver for filming. The role came with a test deal, which means that prospective actors need to commit to the series contract before they even come in and audition — something that Raphael says she only felt comfortable doing because of assurances from production company Hello Sunshine. “I put a tremendous amount of trust and faith into that company, knowing how many women are running the place,” says the actress, who has two children with husband Paul Scheer (The League, Black Monday) and previously worked with Hello Sunshine on The Morning Show. “They understand that when you’re hiring a woman in her 40s, who is coming to the part with all of her life experience, you’re also hiring someone who has a full life that needs to be considered.”

Raphael has been in the comedy scene, across both coasts, since her days at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. It was there that she met Casey Wilson, her best friend and longtime creative collaborator; the two first began performing together at the Upright Citizens Brigade, eventually creating the long-running two-woman show Rode Hard and Put Away Wet. The show earned them literary agents, and the pair spent their early years in the industry writing scripts like 2009’s Anne Hathaway-Kate Hudson led Bride Wars, and the 2013 Sundance breakout Ass Backwards (in which they also starred). During that time, Raphael built a cohort of female comedians — Jessica St. Clair, Danielle Schneider, Lennon Parham, Melissa Rauch — who are both her best friends and chief competition.

“Jess and I were auditioning for an ABC pilot together, and I of course showed up in moccasins and she wore a tank top that was stained,” she says. “We’d see other women come in with full blowouts, and we felt like outsiders who didn’t have their shit together, so we connected over the feeling of, how do you do this?” Where they could have turned against each other, Raphael says, they turned toward each other, and often their group chat can serve as a platform to share casting opportunities, offer each other jobs and weigh in on what they’re seeing in the industry. “I sent Jessica something recently that I was offered, that I was really disturbed by — I was never going to do it, but it’s helpful to have someone else as a sounding board. Like, can you fucking believe this?”

She’s since built a separate business with St. Clair, launching their podcast The Deep Dive during the COVID-19 pandemic and later their members-only spinoff The Deep Dive Academy. She balances the franchise alongside her longstanding podcast How Did This Get Made, co-hosted by Scheer and Jason Mantzoukas (St. Clair, an old friend and former comedy partner of Mantzoukas, is a frequent guest host). “We’ve been around so long that when we started the podcast, people would ask what station it was on,” laughs Raphael. “We’re very strategic about staying the course. We’re not going to turn it into a TV show. We won’t let it get bigger than our other projects. I’m too pretty to do a podcast full-time.”

During the ’00s, Raphael also saw a lot of scripts come through with less-than-desirable female roles. “There were a lot of parts that were, like, the wife that was supporting the comedy of the men,” she says. The actress was often passed over for those roles — this being before her blonde era — a fact that she is grateful for now. “The parts that I did get, they allowed me to demand that I have jokes. I could say, this needs to be sharper, I need something funny to do here. It created a standard for myself.” That standard took her all the way through to Grace and Frankie, her longest running onscreen job to date and a relic of a time when networks allowed television comedies to build their audiences and their voices. It was on that set that Raphael came into her own as an artist even more — she started production just weeks after giving birth to her first child (she had her second son between seasons two and three), and watched her onscreen mother Jane Fonda set a precedent for humility and openness. “I learned that the standard should not be, I did the scene right and everybody’s happy, but, I risked something of myself to potentially be wrong,” she says. “That’s one of the things I can offer this younger group of actors on Elle. They haven’t asked for my mentorship, but it doesn’t mean I’m not providing it.”

The role of Eva Woods is a departure for Raphael, in part because of its tenor. While Elle retains the light and often quirky comedic touches of its franchise predecessors, it’s more of a coming-of-age tale than anything else. Elle is in high school when her parents relocated to Seattle, and the first season follows her attempts to find a path in the Pacific Northwest, helped along by her mother’s guidance. “I get a lot of offers for super-sharp characters like Brianna on Grace and Frankie, but I wanted people to know that this softer side is also available to me,” says Raphael. “I’ve had so many fans come up to me like, ‘We wish you would do more dramatic roles.’ I’m not turning them down! It’s like when my parents used to ask, ‘Can you do one of the big movies?’ I’d love to, guys.”

Elle will run for at least two seasons — Prime Video handed down a lightning fast renewal, and the cast has already completed filming on the second season — and, Raphael hopes, even more. But she’s also looking ahead at other passion projects, like a long-gestating pilot she’s been working on with Scheer and Marta Kauffman (Friends, Grace and Frankie). Dinks, about a dual-income-no-kids couple, is a fully-improvised sitcom that starts with a basic outline and then works off of suggestions from the live audience. The couple shot one version for CBS, and then another for Amazon, and they’re awaiting word on whether it’s going to be picked up for series. “It’s literally the anti-AI show,” she says. “It’s incredibly innovative and cutting edge, and also the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I both want to always do that show and never do it again.”

Raphael says it was actually the original Legally Blonde film that helped her get comfortable with the idea of doing improv in the first place. “I used to feel like I couldn’t do improv because I didn’t know enough Star Wars references and I didn’t want to wear sneakers onstage,” she says. When she saw the film in theaters for the first time, it felt like a revelation. “Reese’s performance was like ‘Oh, you can be hyper feminine and funny.’ Elle Woods raised me, in a way, because she didn’t sell herself out.”