Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (and Everything in Between) (2016)

I don’t know if we’ll ever live in a world where sixteen-year-old boys will throw their PlayStations in the trash because they’ve discovered they’d rather sit in the movie theater watching Best Exotic Marigold Hotel 12, but I’m guessing it probably won’t be in my lifetime. Most movies are made for people who want to watch Jurassic World over and over. Hollywood is mostly for young people, and young people mostly like to look at other young people because that’s who they relate to. The people who pay for movies and TV to get made are mainly making them for young people too. In television, “young people” are people ages eighteen to forty-nine. You may have heard of these people—they’re sometimes referred to as the “key demographic.” They’re the ones whose attention advertisers most want to capture on television and in the movies, and I’m going to tell you why: paper towels.

I was recently at the house of a friend who’d just made one of those trips to Costco where you feel really smug about all the money you saved until you get home and can’t fit the twenty-pound jar of generic peanut butter in any of your cupboards because you forgot about the ten giant jars you already have. So she was trying to get rid of some stuff. She offered me one of those twelve-packs of paper towels that can also be used as an air mattress if you have a guest over, and I was pretty psyched to take it off her hands. I happened to actually need paper towels, and I was like, wow, what a great coincidence. Then I looked at them a little more closely, and I realized they weren’t my brand of paper towels.

I always feel guilty when I use paper towels, but what makes me feel slightly better is getting the kind that are perforated at narrower intervals and can be ripped off into smaller sections. I feel better because at least I’m not using a whole towel. So I turned down these free, non-perforated paper towels, which my friend thought was crazy, and that’s how I suddenly realized I was out of the key demo.

To some degree, I get why our business likes ’em young. Advertisers want people they can convert, people who haven’t yet made up their minds about things like what their favorite paper towels are or what car they like to drive—people who might change their minds and switch to a different brand because of the ads they see. But as consumers get older, they decide what they like to use and they hardly ever deviate, which means advertisers need to move on to influence the next batch of potential paper towel devotees. Which is why there aren’t more older people—especially women, who apparently have a tendency to pick their paper towel preferences earliest—in movies and television.

“But what about Betty White?” you ask. You’re right! Betty White is hilarious, talented, and still working. That is so incredibly rare that she is literally the only person anyone ever mentions when challenging my paper towel theory. No one ever says “What about Betty White and Bathsheba Phlellington?” because Bathsheba Phlellington stopped getting work years ago, and that’s only partially because I made her up. There simply isn’t a ton of work for women in her category, and therefore there isn’t one other example of a Betty White type other than Betty White herself. There are a handful of women who are slightly younger than Betty that I could cite as examples, it’s true, but I dare you to name five who aren’t Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton or who don’t also have the word “Dame” in front of their name.

Carrie Fisher is one of my favorite actors and writers. I’ve enjoyed her films, seen her on Broadway, and read everything she’s written. When I was writing my novel Someday, Someday, Maybe, I kept her Postcards from the Edge on my desk the whole time, and when I got stuck I’d pick it up and reread sections I’d already read a dozen times. Our books are very different, but the fact that she is an actress who wrote a novel—one that was loosely based on her own life—and became a successful screenwriter was a big inspiration to me.

Recently Carrie Fisher responded to a New York Post article that quoted her mentioning the pressure she’d felt to lose weight for the most recent Star Wars film. The writer commented that if she didn’t like being judged on her looks, she should “quit acting.” He went on to say, regarding her work as a writer, “No one would know the name Carrie Fisher if it weren’t for her ability to leverage her looks.”

Carrie Fisher is a bestselling author and screenwriter, giant movie star, and all-around attractive person. And there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of really beautiful people in New York and Los Angeles who’ve come to those places in an attempt to become actors. If getting work as an actor was simply about leveraging your looks—if that was the sole currency of success in our field—then everyone on Vanderpump Rules would be winning Oscars one day and I would be the center pullout thing in next month’s Maxim. I’m not saying either thing can’t happen, but it hasn’t yet, perhaps because there’s at least a subtle difference between acting on a reality show and modeling, on one hand, and being a talent like Carrie Fisher, on the other. “Leveraging one’s looks” is just one component. Also, I’m not even sure Maxim has a center pullout thing.

One day I might not feel like “leveraging my looks” anymore, and I’m okay with that. I’d like to age gracefully, although I’m not yet entirely sure what that will mean. I just know there are certain things I don’t want to have to do to look younger. I don’t have problems with plastic surgery in theory. Wait—that’s not true. I do sort of have problems with it. I’m just trying to sound blasé about something that’s currently fashionable but also troubling to me. See also: high-waisted jeans.

For starters, as a viewer, I just can’t stand it when it’s all I can see. Suddenly I go from watching a scene with two actors I like to being more focused on a conversation between Upper Lip Filler and Botox, and it’s too distracting. If I could be guaranteed that no one, including myself, would notice something I did to my face to look younger or somehow better, maybe I’d do it, but I feel like I have one of those faces that shows that sort of stuff too easily, and I don’t want to be worried that you’ll start mistaking my forehead for a skating rink.

Also, while there’s nothing wrong with doing things to make you feel better, I just wish the choices were limited to simpler things many of us have access to, like drinking more water or jogging or finding a more flattering shade of lipstick. It’s a bummer that it’s even an option to appear more youthful by chopping off your ears and reattaching them in order to hoist up your neck flaps (this may not be the precise surgical term). It’s confusing to me that my aversion to doing that has any sort of bearing on my work as an actor. “You mean you aren’t willing to chop off and reattatch your ears in order to hoist up your neck flaps, Lauren? Don’t you care about us? Where’s your commitment to your craft?” mean people on the Internet yell. I wish this possibility simply didn’t exist, so that we all had somewhat of a fair playing field. But this is as futile a concept as my belief that everyone who’s born should automatically be allowed to live until age eighty-five. The people who treat themselves the most healthfully would get extra credit, more time to live longer; the partiers and couch potatoes would get docked points, living less long. This system is much more fair than the random “sometimes smokers live into their nineties, while marathon runners occasionally drop dead at forty-five” thing we’ve got going now. But alas.

Another remarkable thing about Betty White is that she went from being twenty- and thirtysomething Betty to eightysomething Betty while maintaining the same wonderful quality she always had of just plain being Betty White. No matter what character she plays, Betty White is always funny, always smart, and always at least a little sexy. She didn’t set herself up early on as hot temptress Betty White, and therefore she didn’t have to desperately try to cling to her hot temptress persona, pretending with each passing year that nothing had changed. She didn’t have to face headlines like “Betty White: Hot Temptress! Back and Better than Ever!” or “Betty White: Still Hot Temptress?” or “Sad Betty White Seen Clubbing at Limelight! Desperate to Reign as Hot Temptress Once More!” Also, that Limelight (which closed in the 1990s, I think) is literally the only club name I could think of should tell you a great deal about my clubbing habits.

In The First Wives Club, Goldie Hawn’s actress character says there are only three ages for women in Hollywood: “babe, district attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.” This suggests that acting careers follow a three-act structure, which makes sense. For the people who are willing to do the ear-staple-neck-flap surgery, perhaps the second act lasts longer. I haven’t gotten to my last act yet (Ole Granny Sack Pants? Cranky Irish Potato Maven?), but so far for me career-wise, I’d call my first two acts Gal About Town and The Mom.

Gal About Town is a career girl on the go. She’s looking for love but can’t be tied down yet because she’s trying to get ahead at the office. Occasionally she’s part of a couple, but mainly she’s single and career-focused and goes out on dates that don’t go well. GAT meets friends in bars and stays out late and takes fashion risks. She wears high-heeled shoes and her winter coat is red or yellow. She has lots of girlfriends she can call when times get tough. Often one of her best friends is a guy she could never picture herself being with romantically, but eventually she’ll realize she was wrong and he was the one all along, and isn’t it ironic that he was right there in front of her the whole time? When I started out, I did a lot of guest spots and almost all of them were GATs: Seinfeld, Law & Order, and NewsRadio.

My other Gals About Town:

Liz in Good Company

Molly in Conrad Bloom

Jules in One True Thing

Sue in Bad Santa (she really got around town)

Maggie in Because I Said So

The Mom, on the other hand, wears plaid shirts and sneakers, and is usually described as “tired,” “beleaguered,” or possessing a “faded beauty.” The Mom is often harried or overworked, and we know this because, usually in her very first scene, she says frustratedly: “Guys, c’mon! We’re going to be late!” The Mom is often single, but we don’t always know exactly why, or what happened. There will be one scene where The Mom is with her kid(s) and wistfully refers to “your father,” but we aren’t sure if he’s dead or just away somewhere. Weirdly, The Mom doesn’t seem to have that many friends. At most, she has one recently divorced friend who dates younger men and smokes and tells The Mom she needs to get out more. While the GATs usually have tons of personality traits and quirks, The Moms aren’t usually as specific. Almost every Mom I’ve played has a scene where she folds laundry. The GATs never do this. They must be too busy having dates with Mr. Wrong and getting their dry cleaning delivered. Sometimes members of the crew on a Mom project won’t even use my character name but will just refer to me as “The Mom”: “Okay, now, The Mom stands over here with the laundry basket.” I don’t know why The Mom can’t be as specific and unique as the GATs. I think it’s because the GATs are most often in the center of the story and The Mom seldom is, because, paper towels.

My Moms have included:

Joan in Evan Almighty

Phyllis in Flash of Genius

Pamela in Max

Jules in Middle School

By the time I was cast as Sarah Braverman on Parenthood, playing the mom of two teenagers was age appropriate. But the first time I read Gilmore Girls, I was thirty-one years old. I had played the mother of a brand-new baby once (Denise on Townies), but even that character was considered a very young mom. For four years in Los Angeles I’d been almost exclusively in the GAT world. But that was about to change.

When I got the script for the Gilmore Girls pilot, I was in New York, staying in a friend’s studio apartment, waiting to hear if the series I’d just completed for NBC—Don Roos’s M.Y.O.B.—was going to be picked up for a second season or cancelled. Waiting to hear if your TV show is going to be picked up or not is always a stressful time. “Did you hear anything?” you ask your agent roughly twelve times a day. By call number five, your agent mysteriously begins to be “in a meeting,” “with Hugh Jackman buying pants,” or “out foraging for truffles.”

The Gilmore Girls script had actually been sent to me once before, but I hadn’t read it. I didn’t want to read something and fall in love with it only to find out I wasn’t available. But they hadn’t found anyone, and they were still interested. “They’ll take you in second position now,” my agent told me, which meant that, unlike the first time I’d been sent the script, they were willing to roll the dice. If I auditioned and they wanted me, they’d go ahead and shoot the pilot with me, hoping the other show didn’t get picked up.

And that’s what happened.

Well, what really happened was that I got the part, shot the pilot, and chewed off my fingernails for the next three months, during which time Gilmore Girls was picked up at the WB, but M.Y.O.B. wasn’t yet cancelled at NBC—there was still the possibility of a second season. Years later, one of the TV executives who’d been involved at the time told me they’d finally cleared me for Gilmore Girls because they’d “swapped me” for another actor at some other network who was also tied to two projects, confirming my suspicion that if you want to know what Hollywood is really like, just watch The Hunger Games over and over.

But after all that, the part was mine, and I was set to play Lorelai Gilmore, the thirty-two-year-old mother of a sixteen-year-old girl. When I told people the premise of Gilmore Girls, most of them, especially other actresses my age, would inevitably say, “Don’t you worry about getting typecast as The Mom? Aren’t you worried it will age you?” But honestly, I never once thought about it. To me, Lorelai was equal parts Gal About Town and The Mom, plus a magical mix of smarts and humor that made her totally unique. I read somewhere that Christopher Reeve said one of the ways he knew a part was for him was when he couldn’t stand the idea of anyone else doing it. I know that exact feeling. There’s a sort of manic recognition that happens very rarely when I read something I want so much that I go briefly but totally bonkers. That feeling is a combination of “Hello, old friend” meets EVERYONE GET OUT OF MY WAY SHE’S MINE ALL MINE.

At the time, I’d been in a string of shows that hadn’t lasted very long. I worked enough, and fairly steadily, but nothing had come close to sticking. Yet when I told my mom about Gilmore Girls, I remember her saying, “I have a feeling about this one.”

And she was right.

I know how lucky I am to have had such wonderful first and second acts in my career. I’m still not sure what my third act will turn out to be (Sexy Baking Competition Hostess? Flamboyant Peruvian Bingo Caller?), but if you happen to run into Betty White, tell her thank you.

I’d like to be like her one day.