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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
