Tom Everett Scott On Why His Elle Role Is Different From TSITP's Adam
Elle Woods has something in common with Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher.
It would seem that whenever a teen drama on Prime Video needs an affluent, out-of-touch dad to struggle to understand his children’s lives, there’s one go-to guy: Tom Everett Scott. In the Legally Blonde prequel series Elle, Scott futzes around Seattle as Wyatt Woods, a discarded plastic surgeon who exists on the superficial edges of his family. For The Summer I Turned Pretty fans, the character will instantly bring to mind Adam Fisher, another somewhat superfluous patriarch with a penchant for the finer things in life (champagne, anyone?). While Scott can see the clear similarities between his two fatherly roles, he points out an important distinction.
“They’re not totally different, but they do have really different personalities,” Scott tells Elite Daily. “Adam is so much gruffer, and he’s a little tougher to take. Whereas Wyatt is just a genuinely positive person.”
It’s true that despite outward appearances, Wyatt is a generally softer version of Adam. In Elle, Wyatt is more of a neutral presence who giddily immerses himself in Seattle life while his wife and daughter spurn their new surroundings. On the other hand, Adam Fisher is a much more active agent of discord in The Summer I Turned Pretty — despite also being largely absent, when Adam does reappear in his sons’ lives, it’s almost always results in something traumatic.
Adam’s actions are frequently disparaged by the characters in The Summer I Turned Pretty, but one of the big jokes in Elle is how Wyatt is frequently looked over by everyone around him. That’s not to say that Wyatt’s emotional distance doesn’t have negative effects, though. By the end of the first season, his wife Eva confronts him about how she’s unhappy in their marriage due to constantly taking a backseat to his career.
The cliffhanger seems to be suggesting a separation or divorce in Season 2, which would not only diverge from Legally Blonde’s image of Elle’s parents as a happily married couple, but may also reveal some new personality traits in Wyatt fans haven’t seen yet. So, will he become more or less like Adam Fisher now that it’s looking like he’s following a similar path? Only time will tell.
