I Genuinely Can’t Watch "Gilmore Girls" The Same Way Again After Reading These 21 Facts
1.First, Luke's signature outfit includes various flannel shirts and a blue baseball hat that he wears backwards. According to key set costumer, Valerie Campbell, there was an entire closet filled with flannels for Luke, but he only had one blue hat.
Valerie even joked that the hat would get lost pretty often. Scott Patterson took Luke's hats home after filming wrapped, too.
2.Lauren Graham almost didn't play Lorelai Gilmore because she was already under contract with another TV show called M.Y.O.B. In her book, Talking As Fast As I Can, Lauren explained that when she got the script for the Gilmore Girls pilot, she was in NYC waiting to hear if M.Y.O.B. would get picked up for a second season.
Casting director Jill Anthony, who casted the show's pilot, said the casting department had a feeling M.Y.O.B. wouldn't get a second season but respected Lauren remaining loyal to her prior commitment. Once Lauren and Alexis Bledel were cast, the casting team then went out and found Edward Herrmann and Kelly Bishop.
3.Kelly Bishop and Edward Herrmann became very close while filming Gilmore Girls, and they would often get drinks and lunch together. Ed's wife, Star Herrmann, refers to Kelly as his "second wife." When Ed's family made the decision to take him off of life support prior to his death in 2014, Kelly was the only cast member they invited to say goodbye.
"It was important to him, and it was important to her," Star said. Meanwhile, Kelly recalled to Vanity Fair, "I was so touched by that. This said to me, 'Well, Ed must have expressed a great fondness for me, for you to have thought to include me in this very small family group.'"
4.In the Season 3 episode, "They Shoot Gilmores, Don't They?," which includes the Stars Hollow Dance Marathon, a lot of the background actors were actually professional swing dancers. This was another episode that took a long time to film and prep because there were so many characters in the scenes.
According to Valerie, some of the background actors brought their own clothes since they were dancers and then the costume department added a few of their own pieces to finish the outfits.
5.Sally Struthers and Ted Rooney, who played Babette and Morey, both grew up in Portland and went to the same high school. Although they attended years apart, Ted's dad was one of Sally's teachers.
On Scott's Gilmore Girls podcast, I Am All In, Ted revealed that while he and Sally didn't know each other in high school when they met on the set of Gilmore Girls years later, Sally instantly recognized Ted as Ed Rooney's son when he said he also grew up in Portland.
6.Due to the fact that the Stars Hollow town hall meetings included so many characters, they would take a full day to film, sometimes around 20 hours. In order to pass the time, the cast would play games, like "What's in my purse?" where Sally would have people guess random items in, well, her purse.
The scenes would take so long to film due to the amount of coverage needed for the scene, aka the amount of times the camera had to bounce from one character to another when they had dialogue.
7.In general, the goal was for every Gilmore Girls scene to be only "20-to-25 seconds [per] page of dialogue," which was "more than twice as fast as the standard screenwriters' page-a-minute formula."
Alexis said she got so good at memorizing long scripts that she could watch a news broadcast and pretty much remember everything verbatim.
8.At one point early in the show's run, after each take of a three-page scene between Lauren and Kelly, a script supervisor reportedly called out the elapsed time to creator Amy Sherman-Palladino to ask if they were talking fast enough.
For the scene between Lauren and Kelly, they finally sped up enough to Amy's desired speed after 13 takes, with the entire scene only lasting 1 minute and 20 seconds, thus shaving 3 seconds off of their original time.
9.Alexis' first acting job was Gilmore Girls, so she was so new to filming a TV show that she never had to hit a mark before, aka going to the exact spot where she needed to deliver her lines in a scene. So, in early episodes, you can spot Lauren putting her arm around Alexis and walking with her because she was helping Alexis find her mark and teaching her how to do so on camera.
"I would put my arm around her and often be arm-in-arm with her," Lauren explained. "So we’re hanging onto each other. I’m literally pulling her to and fro. But she learned very quickly and is obviously a natural, so it’s just one of those things that happened to work." Lauren and Alexis always being arm-in-arm on camera ultimately helped build their great mother-daughter chemistry.
10.The night before filming the episode where Dean and Lindsay get married, Jared Padalecki had gone out all night with friends because he wasn't originally scheduled to film the next day. He woke up to "20 missed calls and text messages" saying he had to be at work and ended up being two hours late and didn't have the scenes memorized yet.
"I didn't have the scene prepared, but I knew the basics of what was going on," Jared recalled. "Luckily I didn't really have many lines at first. It was just us coming out of the chapel. But I ended up having other scenes later that did have dialogue, so at least I had time in the morning where I was in hair and makeup to learn those. He continued, saying, "But it was basically the feeling of that nightmare where you’re naked at school. Except unlike being naked at school, this was naked at school and there are cameras everywhere and it will be on film for all time."
11.Melissa McCarthy revealed one of the worst parts of filming Gilmore Girls was having to wear layers of winter clothing while they shot on the Warner Bros. lot in Los Angeles. In fact, while taking photos for one of the show's posters in Season 1, she recalled that someone passed out because they were so warm.
"Sometimes we were like crammed into small things with coats on but it was actually like 112 degrees in Burbank," Melissa explained.
12.The episode where Jess gives Rory his memorable, "Why did you drop out of Yale?" speech was written by Amy and Dan Palladino, and directed by Kenny Ortega. Kenny directed 12 episodes over the course of Gilmore Girls, and it reunited him with Kelly, with both of them having worked on Dirty Dancing.
Kenny is actually the director behind several iconic Gilmore Girls episodes, like "They Shoot Gilmores, Don't They?," "A Deep-Fried Korean Thanksgiving," "Written in the Stars," "You Jump, I Jump, Jack," and more. Kenny's also known for his work on High School Musical, Hocus Pocus, Julie and the Phantoms, and more.
13.The hardest role to cast was Lane Kim, with the casting directors explaining that they were "committed to finding a Korean actress for the role," but at the time it sadly "limited their pool" while holding pretty standard Hollywood auditions. Keiko Agena ended up being the last person to be cast before the pilot was filmed.
Jill said they were having such a hard time casting Lane that it got to a point where she was "seeing girls in the grocery store and asking them to audition."
14.Meanwhile, Liza Weil originally auditioned for Rory Gilmore. Although she didn't get the role of Rory, the casting directors and Amy loved her so much, they created the role of Paris Gellar just for her.
"The younger version of myself was really freaked out that that’s what they wrote,” Liza said when talked about how she was initially concerned that they immediately thought she could play someone so brash and competitive. She added, "I couldn’t fathom that they would think that they could do that! But now I think it’s really flattering, and I’m really glad."
15.Kirk Gleason was inspired by Amy's father, who was an actor, writer, and comedian. In an episode of the Gilmore Guys podcast, casting directors Mara Casey and Jami Rudofsky shared that Amy's dad was cast on Archie Bunker's Place in various different roles throughout the run of the show, which inspired Kirk, who has numerous jobs in Stars Hollow.
Sean Gunn said he was cast as the DSL installer in Season 1, Episode 2, where his name was Mick, but then when an opportunity came up for another small character, "Swan Man" in Season 1, Episode 3, Amy thought of Sean and wanted him back. She thought it would be funny to have the same actor again and again for these small characters. After a few episodes, Sean explained that he just "became kind of part of the fabric of the town."
16.In "Nick & Nora/Sid & Nancy" in Season 2, when Luke and Jess argue and it ends with Luke shoving Jess in a lake, Scott and Milo Ventimiglia filmed their dialogue "like, 30" times, Milo falling into the lake they only filmed twice, and they ultimately used the first take in the final cut.
"We did get a safety [shot], just in case," Milo recalled on Scott's podcast. "I think we did it twice because I remember I had to change."
17.The dresses worn by the Life and Death Brigade members during "You Jump, I Jump, Jack" were actually used two other times in the series. First, they appeared during Rory's Cotillion in Season 2, then in Season 5, and finally, they were used again in Season 6 when Hep Alien plays at a Bat Mitzvah.
Valerie said the dresses were originally white, as seen in the Cotillion episode, and were then dyed to appear in other episodes.
18.Both Ryan Gosling and Chris Pine auditioned for roles on Gilmore Girls. Ryan came in for a small part as a "football character," according to casting director Jami Rudofsky, but his audition "fell flat." Meanwhile, Chris' very first professional audition was for the show.
Chris joked it was "nepotism at its finest" because his father, actor Robert Pine, asked if he could audition. While Chris couldn't remember the exact Gilmore Girls role he read for, he thinks it was "maybe a boyfriend of someone."
19.George Bell was hired as the dialogue coach on Gilmore Girls due to the fast-paced nature of the series. He explained that his job was to correct the actors who missed words and to help them "Gilmore-ize" the dialogue and speed it up. George also appeared on the show as Professor Bell, one of Rory's teachers at Yale.
Marveling at Lauren's ability to memorize the fast dialogue, George said, "What amazed me about Lauren is that she kind of had like, a photographic memory. She would come to work without having even looked at the lines, but she could process it. She must have had a photographic memory or something. She was so quick with learning the lines."
20.While filming Gilmore Girls, Amy revealed they often avoided doing close-ups because it would "slow things down by lingering on just one actor." This is why the show often used the "walk-and-talk" method, which allowed the cameras to follow actors while they delivered dialogue as they moved.
With the walk-and-talks, directors were unable to splice together different takes, so they often did a scene multiple times all the way through if someone messed up a single word.
21.And finally, when filming wrapped inside Lorelai and Rory's house after Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, Lauren texted Alexis and asked what she wanted her to steal for her from the set. In the end, Alexis took Rory's Yale banner that was on her mirror, and Lauren took the pink flamingo that hung near the back door, and an apple magnet with Rory's face on it that was on the fridge.
In her book, Talking As Fast As I Can, Lauren wrote, "I also take a few framed photos and an apple-shaped magnet with Rory’s face on it that says 'You’re the apple of my eye.'"
