A Twin Peaks Star Nearly Became Gilmore Girls’ Lorelai

Actress Lauren Graham is all but synonymous with her “Gilmore Girls” character Lorelai Gilmore. What fans of Amy Sherman-Palladino’s beloved series might not know, though, is that at one point, a recurring “Gilmore Girls” guest star had a decent shot at playing Lorelai.

Regular cast member Scott Patterson, who plays coffee shop owner and Lorelai’s most important love interest Luke Danes, hosted “Twin Peaks” veteran Mädchen Amick in January 2023 on his eponymous podcast “I Am All In with Scott Patterson,” named for what Patterson’s character famously says to Lorelai once she and Luke finally get together. Amick ended up playing Sherry Tinsdale, an oft-mentioned but rarely seen character who ends up with Rory’s estranged father and Lorelai’s ex Christopher Hayden (David Sutcliffe). During their interview, Patterson asked Amick, “Is it true what I hear, that you were Amy’s [Sherman-Palladino] first choice for Lorelai?”

Ultimately, Amick — who famously played Shelly Johnson on “Twin Peaks” — said she’s not sure if she was Sherman-Palladino’s first choice, but she did audition to play Lorelai. “The big feedback that kept coming back was, ‘We don’t believe that she’s old enough to have a daughter that age — she doesn’t look old enough,'” Amick said, despite the fact that Lorelai had Rory at just 16 years old. “And Amy was saying, ‘But that’s a whole point of the show, that they’re like sisters.'” Alas, this wasn’t enough to get Amick the part, but she did show up on the series as Sherry.

Let’s circle back to the whole Sherry Tinsdale thing, shall we? When we first meet Lorelai and Rory in “Gilmore Girls,” we learn that Lorelai was in high school when she got pregnant with Rory and, rather than marry Christopher as her parents intended, she struck out on her own and forged a career path working at a local inn. Despite not wanting to marry Christopher at 16, Lorelai maintains a decently friendly relationship with her father of her child, and in Season 2 of “Gilmore Girls,” Lorelai and Christopher rekindle their romance quite unexpectedly. Just as unexpectedly, Christopher abruptly tells Lorelai that they can’t keep seeing each other, because his on-again, off-again girlfriend Sherry is pregnant, and he can’t walk away from fatherhood twice.

Sherry is bubbly, earnest, and peppy — basically everything that Lorelai is not — and though she awkwardly tries to force a relationship with Rory, Sherry (and Mädchen Amick) disappears from the series after just three episodes, leaving her and Christopher’s baby in the United States while she takes a job opportunity in Paris. So how did Amick feel about being on a show where she tried and failed to book the lead role … and what was it like to act alongside Lauren Graham?

“She was very gracious — really great,” Amick told Scott Patterson on the podcast. “It’s very hard to come on as a guest star onto a show, and people are already rolling, they already have their rhythm, they already know each other. You know, it’s like the new kid in school. You’re just like, hi. And she was very, very gracious, very welcoming — wanted to make sure that I felt comfortable.”

With the utmost respect to Mädchen Amick, nobody could have played Lorelai Gilmore like Lauren Graham. Not only does her on-screen daughter Alexis Bledel look uncannily like she could be Graham’s actual daughter, but Graham has a particular talent for showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino’s razor-sharp and famously fast-paced dialogue (other hour-long network shows of the “Gilmore Girls” era, scripts typically spanned 40 pages, while a typical script for this small-town show averaged a truly gobsmacking 80 pages). 

Throughout seven original seasons and the 2016 Netflix revival series “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life,” Graham embodies the prickly, brilliant, and big-hearted Lorelai perfectly, and even though she missed out on the lead role, Amick told Scott Patterson that she couldn’t argue with the casting … particularly because of Graham’s aforementioned gift of gab. “I think it was really suited for Lauren Graham,” Amick said. “I think she handled the cadence so naturally, you didn’t question that it wasn’t just how she existed naturally. I think she was really good at that.” 

You can watch Amick’s episodes of “Gilmore Girls,” as well as the entire series, on both Netflix and Hulu, while “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life” streams exclusively on Netflix.