Kelly Bishop, who played grandmother Emily Gilmore on all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls and the show’s reboot, exclusively spoke to E! about the controversial storylines surrounding Rory Gilmore.
Remember when Rory Gilmore was an aspiring overseas correspondent, valedictorian of her prestigious private school, and as her frenemy Paris Geller put it, looked like “little birds help you get dressed in the morning”?
Yup, so does Kelly Bishop, the Gilmore Girls star who famously portrayed Rory’s no-nonsense grandmother Emily Gilmore on the beloved series. And the 80-year-old admits she’s still surprised by the turn her onscreen granddaughter (played by Alexis Bledel) took on the series.
“I think that it would have been nicer if she had stayed truer to herself,” Bishop mused in an exclusive interview with E! News. “Because I remember early on—she was a guest, I don’t know how they got all those good guests—but Christiane Amanpour, that was her idol. And I would have liked to have seen her stick a little bit closer to that.”
Instead, Rory went on to famously break up a marriage, steal a yacht, drop out of Yale, partake in an affair with her engaged ex, dismiss job interviews as beneath her, and—in a shocking final moment of the 2016 Netflix reboot—revealed her surprise pregnancy (by Logan or the Wookie, who’s to say?).
But despite her qualms with the youngest Gilmore’s story, Kelly, whose memoir The Third Gilmore Girl comes out Sept. 17, noted that it wasn’t necessarily unrealistic.
“On the other hand, here is a very protected young woman in a small town at a private school, the whole thing,” the New York-based actress said. “So she’s going to get out there in the newspaper world and she’s going to find a lot of other situations that might be curious for her to explore. Maybe sometimes her judgement wasn’t so good, because she was smart, but she was not terribly sophisticated. So, I think that might be how she got herself into sort of awkward situations.”
As Kelly teased of the final line of the reboot, “I don’t know what happened with Rory. And she says, ‘I’m pregnant.’ Hmm, I wonder who?”
Does this mean that more episodes are on the way to clear up that question? Sorry to burst your Firelight Festival balloon, but it’s probably not worth holding your breath.
“I just think that realistically, it’s probably closed,” Kelly said of the Gilmore Girls chapter. “I would love to see it revisited again just bring us as our characters as our ages and see where we’ve got.”
But—with the passing of Ed Hermann, who played Emily’s husband Richard Gilmore—she noted, the main four would need to be on board: “You’d have to collect together Emily and Rory and Lorelai and Luke.”
Noting the cast’s busy schedules, Kelly, admitted, “It could happen. But I just don’t think it’s likely, frankly.”
And while new episodes aren’t on the horizon, that doesn’t mean the cast doesn’t occasionally get together.
The Friday Night Dinner hostess with the mostess shared that she still meets up with show creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and her on-screen daughter Lauren Graham (Lorelai Gilmore) as often as possible, for what are sure to be the most riveting lunches anyone who has ever graced the halls of Luke’s Diner could have experienced.
“My favorite lunch in the city—and we don’t do it nearly often enough—is Amy Sherman Palladino and Lauren and me, the three of us,” Kelly dished. “Just sit and have a really long lunch and just gab all over the place.”
Perhaps a future topic of conversation could be the celebrated stage and screen actress’ memoir The Third Gilmore Girl, which sees her offer a peek into her seven seasons on the hit mother-daughter series as well as her impressive life and career as a dancer, on the Broadway stage, as the mom of Baby (Jennifer Grey) in Dirty Dancing, and much more.
And though she frequently distances herself from her high society character, Kelly doesn’t view Emily as a villain.
“I think that she’s a complex person. I don’t think that she’s mean,” the veteran actress said of Emily. “But she’s really very severe in so many ways. She’s not sympathetic to me as a character, but she wouldn’t be sympathetic with other people. She would protect her family and her girls and her status quo and all of that, but she’s not warm and fuzzy at all. So, yeah, she’s not at all like me. We have very little in common, very little.”
But that doesn’t mean that playing the DAR darling wasn’t fun.
Her favorite episode, “is what I call the Tennessee Williams episode where Emily finds out that Richard’s mother has written him a letter the night before the wedding begging him not to marry Emily,” Kelly recalled. “And that just sets Emily off into the stratosphere. She sits around in caftans drinking all day, very un-Emily-like, so that was great fun to play. Amy always managed to give me stuff to do that was fun, that was interesting.”
