Gilmore Girls revival cast reveals how they got back into character
With Netflix’s upcoming four-part Gilmore Girls revival, titled Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, a large number of the show’s original cast members were given the opportunity to reinhabit the characters they said goodbye to years ago. However, getting back into character after eight years is an experience every actor approached differently.
As far as Lauren Graham and Kelly Bishop were concerned, snapping back into the mindsets of their Stars Hollow — or Hartford, Connecticut — counterpart was simple. “To pick it up again felt really kind of inevitable,” Graham tells EW of playing Lorelai. “[It was] definitely easy in most ways.”
For Bishop, Emily Gilmore was easy to tap back into because she never went anywhere. “She’s been there all along,” Bishop says. “She travels around with me, so as far as Emily’s personality and her character, it was just waiting for me to climb into the suit and zip it up.”
But not everyone made such a seamless transition. For many of the returning actors, it was about preparation, putting in the work before returning to set. “I thought a lot about it and what I wanted to bring to the character now that would be different from where we left off,” Alexis Bledel says of Rory. “I mostly just imagined where she’s been since we left off, what she’s been doing, how that’s shaped her.”
Ironically, it was Jared Padalecki, who plays Dean, who took the most Rory-esque approach to his preparation: Research, research,…