Can’t keep the Gilmore Girls apart! Prior to the massive cast reunion panel at the ATX Television Festival on Saturday, June 6, the Gilmore Girls’ leads and creator Amy Sherman-Palladino taped a special one-hour interview with the Today show.
The segment, which featured Jared Padalecki, Kelly Bishop, Alexis Bledel, Lauren Graham, and Scott Patterson, touched on the crazy scripts, similarities between character and actor, and each star’s audition for the show.
But they couldn’t get through the interview without discussing the late Edward Herrmann (Richard Gilmore), who passed away on New Year’s Eve and who, sadly, had been the first to RSVP to the festival.
“Oh my god, besides him being a consummate professional with one of the best voices ever, he loved to have fun,” said Bishop, who played his on-screen wife, Emily Gilmore, in the series. “He was highly intelligent. He loved to play. He mentored Alexis, he really took her under his wing because he realized she was new to the business. He was a doll. He was my buddy.”
Bledel, who landed her first acting role on Gilmore, nodded in agreement as Bishop spoke.
“He was a good guy to have a martini with,” show creator Sherman-Palladino remembered. “He had a mouth on him sometimes. He had a saucy side to his sophistication. That he’s not here, it’s still kind of freaking me out. He was the only person we wanted for Richard.”
The praised writer and creator was also confident that there would still be a place for Stars Hollow in the current binge-watch-happy TV climate.
“As much as there’s reality television, and everyone is voted on and off an island, this is also an age of Netflix and Amazon and Hulu,” she said. “Content is key right now. They’re hungry for stories and story-telling. And while I don’t know that Gilmore could exist in the exact same fashion that it did, content and characters and stories, they are taking back the airwaves. I do feel like it would be a harder sell, but I think there would still be a world for it.”
As for a world in which a Gilmore Girls movie or reboot existed, the cast seemed hopeful, but diplomatic as ever.
“I think there’s willingness and there’s nothing standing in our way,” Graham said. “For me, this in particular because Amy wasn’t with us the last year, there was a feeling of this is incomplete. There is creative justification to finish this story in a different way. Will we get to do it? There are a million other people who make those decisions.”
When asked about Lorelai’s main love interests on the show — Luke (Patterson) and Rory’s father Christopher (David Sutcliffe) — the whole group laughed it off before Graham confidently declared, “It’s Luke and Lorelai!”
But when questioned about Rory’s three main love interests — Dean, Jess, and Logan — the answer wasn’t quite as simple.
“Jess was troubled. I think Logan seemed like the most mature guy and then he became a lawyer on CBS,” Graham joked, referencing actor Matt Czuchry’s role on The Good Wife.
Finally, it was Bledel who gave the best answer.
“I think she’d be seeing someone new,” the actress said, laughing. “She’d definitely be a journalist, and she’d be either in a relationship or single. I don’t think she’d be married.”
