Kelly Bishop Says Amy Sherman-Palladino Advocated for Her Role inGilmore Girls: ‘I Have My Emily’ (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Kelly Bishop and ‘The Third Gilmore Girl’.Photo:CHAD GRIFFITH/DAY REPS; Simon & Schuster

CHAD GRIFFITH/DAY REPS; Simon & Schuster

Looking back on her acclaimed career on the stage and screen, actressKelly Bishopis nothing but grateful.“What impressed me probably about the whole thing is how very, very fortunate I’ve been, not only in the jobs I’ve gotten, but what happened to those jobs,” Bishop, 80, tells PEOPLE for this week’s print issue. “I wasn’t looking for a gift. I was looking for an interesting job … I’ve been very, very fortunate.”

The PEOPLE Puzzler crossword is here! How quickly can you solve it? Play now!

Kelly Bishop.CHAD GRIFFITH/DAY REPS

CHAD GRIFFITH/DAY REPS

Bishop, however, always wanted to act, and the dream led to roles in projects like the classic filmDirty Dancingand the Prime Video seriesThe Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Most beloved of those roles, perhaps, is that of Emily Gilmore, the wealthy, occasionally brooding matriarch on the WB and CW showGilmore Girls, which aired from 2000-2007. It was Emily’s similarities to Bishop’s own mother and grandmother’s dynamics, as well as Emily’s snarkiness, that drew Bishop to the part.“She was such a difficult woman, and I love playing difficult women,” Bishop says. “I much prefer them to the nice moms.”But Bishop didn’t always think she would land the role of Emily, as she recounts in her memoir. Read the full story, or listen to it in audio form, in an exclusive excerpt fromThe Third Gilmore Girlbelow.

An excerpt from Kelly Bishop’s ‘The Third Gilmore Girl’

Pilot season of 2000 was the usual flurry. The seriesThe Sopranoshad debuted in 1999 and became a huge hit, so it was predictable that almost every half-hour script I read was an effort to cash in on that success in comedy form, one live-audience sitcom after another about, what a surprise, an Italian family. A lot of us theater people enjoyed doing sitcoms for that familiar experience of performing for a live audience, but not one of those scripts appealed to me, even a little.This particular call from Robert was to alert me to another script he’d just sent that he thought I might want to pay particular attention to. He described it as “an interesting one-hour comedy-drama.” Okay, I hadn’t read one of those yet. But what intrigued me even more was the fact that, refreshingly, the title didn’t sound Italian at all.It was calledGilmore Girls, and Robert wanted to submit me for the role of Emily, the matriarch of the Gilmore family.I told him I’d look it over and let him know if I’d like to pursue it. Then I sat down to read the script, and it was love at first sight. I’d never read anything like it. Its writer,Amy Sherman-Palladino, was obviously brilliant. The dialogue was smart, razor-sharp and unpredictable. The humor was a delight, and utterly unique.

Amy Sherman-Palladino in 2024.John Nacion/Getty Images

John Nacion/Getty Images

Maybe most of all, the more I studied it, the more amazed I was at how closely I identified with the relationship dynamics of the Gilmore girls themselves:Lorelai. 32 years old. Only 16 when she got pregnant with her daughter, Rory, to the stern, judgmental disapproval of her wealthy high-society parents. Insists on earning everything she has, rather than expecting it to be handed to her. Fiercely loves her daughter and chooses to be her best friend as well as her mother—very much like my mom did with me.

Thanks to this extraordinary script, I might have an opportunity to explore Louise and her strained relationship with my mom through exploring Emily and her strained relationship with Lorelai, and, to add to the perfection, play a cold, condescending, emotionally distant mother, which is infinitely more fun than playing a nice one. I called Robert back the instant I finished reading with a simple, emphatic “Yes, please.”

The cast of ‘The Gilmore Girls’ in 2000.Maximum Film / Alamy Stock Photo

Maximum Film / Alamy Stock Photo

• • *I was more excited than nervous when I took the train into New York City to tape myGilmore Girlsaudition. I’ve always been a big believer that part of my job as an actor is to learn my lines and make them work exactly as written, word for word, no improvising, especially on a script as perfect as this one, so I’d worked very hard on it, and on the character of Emily, to internalize her rather than simply “recite” her or “act” her.One of the first people I met at the audition was Amy Sherman-Palladino. I already knew from her writing that she was smart, with an edgy, unconventional sense of humor. It was immediately  apparent that there was also an eclectic self-confidence about her that was a real breath of fresh air. I’d read that she grew up in North Hollywood, Calif., which always struck me as kind of a bland, personality-free suburb of Los Angeles. I was intrigued to discover that she actually struck me as someone who could easily have been born and raised in some charming bohemian neighborhood in Greenwich Village. There was no pretense about her, no slickness, no political glad-handing or equivocating, just a woman who knew the value of her work and the quality of her project and was crystal clear on how it should be done.

source: people.com