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3. Cast as Elle Woods just a year after she cut her own career at Stanford short, Reese Witherspoon conducted thorough research into life as a co-ed, sitting in on classes at Loyola Law School and dining with sorority sisters at the University of Southern California. "It's sort of like an anthropological study," she explained to Entertainment Weekly in 2001. "You learn what they eat, how they behave, how they take care of their young, that sort of thing."
Matthew Davis, meanwhile, loosely based his portrayal of Elle's soon-to-be ex Warner Huntington III (the aspiring senator on the hunt for a Jackie, not a Marilyn), on George W. Bush, studying up by reading the then-president's biography.