14 little-known secrets about Lorelai Gilmore even die-hard ‘Gilmore Girls’ fans may have missed

Lorelai makes multiple references to the Bangles throughout the series.

When Rory’s teacher Max first suggests that he and Lorelai should date because they both want to, she proclaims, “Well I want to be in the Bangles but that doesn’t mean I quit my job and get a guitar and ruin my life to be a Bangle, does it?”

On season two, she also goes to a Bangles concert with Rory and even mentions that she almost named Rory after the band’s lead singer, Susanna Hoffs.

When Graham auditioned to play Lorelai, she was also committed to another show.

In her 2016 memoir, “Talking as Fast as I Can,” she said she shot the “Gilmore Girls” pilot in the hopes that her other show, NBC’s “Don Rooses’ M.Y.O.B.,” wouldn’t work out. 

Luckily for all “Gilmore Girls” fans, the NBC show was canceled, leaving her open to take the role.

Lorelai always seems to know what she wants and how to go after it. So perhaps unsurprisingly, she made the first move with Rory’s dad, Christopher. 

They’d known each other since they were 6, but Christopher tells Rory that when they were teenagers, Lorelai walked up and kissed him out of nowhere.

Christopher also said that became the best day of his life.

One of the most notable things about “Gilmore Girls” is how much and how fast the characters talk.

Sherman-Palladino and her husband Dan Palladino told The New York Times in 2020 that the scripts were typically 20 pages longer than similar shows because of how much dialogue was packed into them. 

That reportedly led both Graham and Scott Patterson, who played Luke Danes, to quit smoking for their roles. 

“She needed her wind,” Patterson told The New York Times for the same 2020 feature. “And I needed my wind.”

On season five, episode 21, “Blame Booze and Melville,” Lorelai thinks she might be pregnant after a night of unprotected sex with Luke.

Her one symptom is craving an apple, which apparently hasn’t happened since she was pregnant with Rory. 

She didn’t turn out to be pregnant and went back to her junk-food habit. But the creators still used that fact to tease a pregnancy in the 2016 Netflix revival “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life,” by posting a plate of Pop-Tarts around a single apple on Instagram.

Fans disagree on many moments on the show, and one of the most contentious is Christoper and Lorelai’s marriage on season seven. 

Apparently, Graham felt the same way — so much so that she actually forgot it happened at all. She told EW in 2016 that someone had to remind her that Lorelai got married.

“It just seemed so out of character that I literally blocked it from my memory,” she said. “That was my season 7 experience.”

Richard Gilmore’s funeral on “A Year in the Life” is a heartbreaking scene for viewers. And it was apparently equally heartbreaking for the actors since actor Edward Hermann died in 2014. 

On the final episode of the miniseries, Lorelai struggles to come up with a positive memory of her father, as the two had a strained relationship. Eventually, she lands on an anecdote of her 13th birthday.

After getting her heart broken and facing ridicule at school, she ditched and went to the mall. Richard found her there, bought her snacks, and took her to the movies. 

She tells her mother that was her favorite birthday. 

This story was originally published in October 2022 and most recently updated on October 22, 2024.