‘Elle’ Star Jacob Moskovitz on Joining the ‘Legally Blonde’ Series and Working With Hero Robert Pattinson in ‘Here…

There are few opportunities for TV actors to get the chance to spend more than a year with a character before viewers come into the picture, but Jacob Moskovitz and the rest of the Elle cast have had over a year and two seasons with the characters.

The Prime Video coming-of-age series, which serves as a prequel to Legally Blonde, just premiered on July 1, but the cast has already wrapped filming season two. “It was a lot of mental gymnastics and spoiler anxiety,” Moskovitz — who plays one of Elle’s love interests, Miles, in the show — jokingly tells The Hollywood Reporter of how it’s been living in season two as promotion for season one ramps up.

The actor says the group of actors, led by Elle Woods herself, Lexi Minetree, developed a solid foundation with each other and in themselves filming the next season before the first had aired. “It was honestly really nice to get to live with the characters a little longer before the final ingredient of the audience came in,” he says. “It was like our world for two seasons.”

From the beginning, Moskovitz knew that Elle would be a big project, but it didn’t quite hit him how big until Legally Blonde’s 25th anniversary earlier this year. He and the other cast attended an event that reunited the original film’s cast. Moskovitz said the original cast offered the new cohort some advice: Let Elle Woods lead and their characters would be shaped around her.

In Elle, the titular character finds herself transported from her glamorous life in Bel Air to rainy and grungy Seattle. Similar to Elle’s hurdle in Legally Blonde — just swap Harvard for Seattle — the character must find a way to fit into a place she doesn’t feel the most welcomed in.

Moskovitz’s character, Miles, is one the first people at school to show Elle kindness. The actor recalls a professor he had once declaring that one of the rarest things to see onscreen and in the theater is kindness. Naturally, a crush forms. But Miles spends the first part of Elle off-limits, however, as he starts the show as the boyfriend to a girl whom Elle desperately wants to be her friend. “It takes her a while to sort of befriend the others, but he’s instantly drawn to her and taken by her,” he says.

The actor, of course, always knew this was a Legally Blonde project, but the reality hit him a few times — getting to set in Vancouver and the film’s 25th anniversary event. “We all know how huge this film is, but I think a part of me had to just be like, ‘I’m just going to not pay attention to any of that,’” he says. That feeling Moskovitz had was shared by many of the other actors on the project, largely new characters not introduced in the Legally Blonde canon before the series. Minetree, of course, was the exception as she had to eat, sleep and breathe the pink-tinted world.

“Meeting Reese and knowing that she was behind all of this has given the audience a lot of faith and has given us a lot of faith and trust. [It] gave us a safety net to just play and do our jobs,” Moskovitz says. “We had to study really hard and then we had to forget about it and support Lexi.”

The actor is quick to compliment his co-star, particularly given the fact he and the other young actors didn’t have the baggage of playing a legacy character like Minetree did. “She has to maintain this hero character. She’s just incredible,” he says. “She didn’t need anyone’s help, honestly.”

Elle marks Moskovitz’s biggest project to date; he spent his post-college New York life working catering jobs and doing theater downtown. He’s honest that he wasn’t necessarily looking to be part of the YA world, but since joining the show he’s looking at the genre differently. “It feels like human stories about the message of authenticity,” he says.

Miles, as a character, is important to the actor. “I drew on my high school experience immensely to play him because this is just a guy who is Mr. Perfect. He’s the golden boy and everybody thinks he’s one thing, but he’s been living his entire life doing what everyone says,” says Moskovtiz.

“Then he meets someone who is so authentically herself, who’s so brave, who’s so determined, who really has a voice, and he sees that in her instantly and like it’s lightning for him,” he continues. “It’s romantic, it’s personal, and he recognizes something he didn’t have his entire life.”

Moskovitz is earnest about the way he speaks of acting. A graduate of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, he got into acting when he was young. He’d been in the stage crew until he joined chorus and his teacher suggested he had a good voice and should try out musicals.

He landed the understudy role, and lo and behold, he ended up needing to go on for the role. There was one small problem: He’d memorized the Broadway bootleg he’d been watching online instead of his school’s version of the show. “I went on and everyone was so confused because I wasn’t doing the blocking of our show. I was doing the blocking of the Broadway performance,” he says, laughing about the memory. “I’m just going to do what Gavin Creel did in the show.”

With Elle having already wrapped filming on its second season, Moskovitz still has a busy second half of the year. Next up, he has Brian, the coming-of-age film that premiered at SXSW earlier this year. His character is “completely different” from Miles, and in describing the film — about a race for class president that finds him as the current class president looking to hold onto his power — he notes the similarity to another Witherspoon classic, Election.

Moskovitz also stars alongside a stacked cast — Denzel Washington, Robert Pattinson and Daisy Edgar-Jones, just to name a few — in the upcoming Netflix film Here Comes the Flood. The film, which shot in Morocco, gave the actor a chance to work with one of his heroes in Pattinson. “I got to work with him and do this really epic war sequence and work with some incredible stunt performers,” he says. “I was just happy [to be there]. I would’ve played a tree in that movie.”