Lauren Graham Manny Carabel/Getty Images
Lauren Graham will never completely say goodbye to Lorelai Gilmore — and is always down for a Stars Hollow reunion.
“I always say yes because it’s the best part I ever had,” Graham, 57, said on the Tuesday, February 4, episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “I love doing it, and I think it was a really wonderful [experience]. It’s just that thing where it was the perfect material at the perfect time with the perfect writer — and it just means so much to me.”
Gilmore Girls, created by Amy Sherman-Palladino, aired for seven seasons on The WB (later The CW) between 2000 and 2007. The sitcom followed fast-talking single mom Lorelai Gilmore (Graham) and her teenage daughter, Rory (Alexis Bledel), who lived in the quirky small town of Stars Hollow, Connecticut. Gilmore Girls also starred Kelly Bishop and Edward Hermann as Lorelai’s parents, Emily and Richard, who lived in the nearby city of Hartford. Ahead of the pilot, Lorelai had been estranged from her parents ever since welcoming Rory when she was 16 years old.
While the OG run of Gilmore Girls wrapped in 2007, the main cast reunited in 2016 for a four-episode revival series on Netflix.
“I will say [the enduring fandom] can be strange at times because, on one hand, people are starting to say, like, ‘You raised me,’ and I’m like, ‘I hope there were other adults involved,’” Graham joked on Tuesday. “And then, on the other hand, people are like, ‘I just have the show on in the background. It puts my dog to sleep, We’re not even listening anymore. It’s just on, like, background music.’”
Graham and Scott Patterson, who played Lorelai’s eventual husband Luke Danes, later reunited for a Walmart campaign that aired in December 2024.
Lauren Graham as Lorelai Gilmore in “Gilmore Girls.” Warner Bros. TV/YouTube
“It’s so wild,” she said of returning to the same set years later. “There are all kinds of things where, like, the door doesn’t really close. It’s on this weird hinge so that it doesn’t make noise. So, you have to close it yourself. And then they said, ‘Oh, shouldn’t you be surprised when you see Kirk, the character played by Sean Gunn, is the Walmart delivery man?’ I said, ‘No, Lorelai wouldn’t be surprised because Kirk takes every job in town.’”
They’re “all in!” Throughout Gilmore Girls’ tenure, eager fans watched lovable grump Luke Danes pine for leading lady Lorelai Gilmore until he eventually won her heart. “I am always, always, always going to go with the very first time that we see those two together in the diner,” Scott Patterson — who portrayed the Stars […]
Graham added, “They didn’t want to get it wrong. … I just didn’t want to make a decision that my boss [Amy] wouldn’t make.”
While there is no formal plan to revive Gilmore Girls again, Sherman-Palladino, 59, previously teased that it could happen down the line.
“[Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life] was so fun, and so to be back, it really felt like a family reunion,” Sherman-Palladino exclusively told Us Weekly in February 2022. “But everybody’s doing [other projects now]. … Everybody’s working, which is annoying for us, but delightful for them, you know?”
She continued, “I know it sounds like bulls— at this point because I keep saying it, but it really is all about the timing. … It’s absolutely not off the table. The stars just haven’t aligned yet.”
