Alexis Bledel is, in the public’s mind, deeply intertwined with her studious, naive girl-next-door character Rory Gilmore. Regardless of her work on The Handmaid’s Tale and the other acclaimed shows sure to come, it is her wide-eyed, Harvard-bound Gilmore Girls character that she will be remembered for.
Now, the 35-year-old actress is revealing how she snagged the role in the first place.
“I was very sick,” Bledel told Seth Meyers on Late Night With Seth Meyers, “I was a student at NYU, and they kept calling me back up to audition. I think I went, like, six times.”
Balancing the stressors of being a full-time college student with incessant auditioning proved to be frustrating.
“I grew a tad bit impatient,” she remembered, “I had a little attitude. And our boss [Amy Sherman-Palladino] really liked that a lot. She [was] like, ‘That’s our girl!’ And I was like, ‘Are you guys gonna bring me back?’ She was like, ‘I like that. That’s perfect.'”
While having an attitude in a job interview is usually not a tactic we would recommend, for Bledel it showed the producers that she had the capacity to play a multi-dimensional, flawed, sometimes-impatient teenager. Without attitude, how else would she reject Chilton for brooding bad-boy Dean? (If you’re gonna throw your life away, he’d better have a motorcycle.)
Watch the clip for yourself below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNmgvI44N5Q