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A Gilmore Girl Exits Onto Career Fast Track
By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 22, 2007; WE33
Let's say there's a celebrity publicist on the line, saying her client's on the other line, and she's ready to be patched through. And, oh -- one thing -- you've got only 10 minutes to ask every question you're hoping to have answered.
Well, you should probably consider yourself lucky if the celebrity in question is Lauren Graham. At least you know she won't waste your time with any silliness like breathing between sentences.
"I didn't know," she begins. "They cut our lunch in half today 'cause we're daylight sensitive and, I just -- so now I have 15 minutes to eat lunch. So now I only have 10 minutes.
"But, um, how are you?"
Fine, thanks.
And a little amused that she still sounds frazzled. Wasn't a major reason for the cancellation of the CW's beloved drama "Gilmore Girls" that Graham and her co-star, Alexis Bledel, wanted to dial down the intensity of their schedules? Right now Graham is on the phone promoting her role in the big-budget comedy "Evan Almighty," and she's talking from a rental car on the set of an indie film she's making with Matthew Perry. She'll go directly from there to shoot another flick with Greg Kinnear and is in the process of firming up plans for another project that will pick up right after that.
At least she hasn't had trouble finding work.
"It's really strange," she muses. "It's really interesting to me. I don't know what to make of it. This is not what I expected this time to be, and it's sort of like each thing has built on the thing before it."
In fact, "Evan Almighty" (see review on Page 35) came along before it was even official that the seventh season of "Gilmore Girls" would be its last. Fans of that show, who worshiped Graham as the single-mom master of rambling monologues and biting one-liners, might be jarred by her performance here. She's Joan, the adoring wife to Steve Carell's narcissistic newscaster-turned-congressman, who is commanded by God (Morgan Freeman) to build an ark in the middle of their Northern Virginia McMansion subdivision. (And it really was built, incidentally, in Crozet, Va., a small town outside Charlottesville where much of the film was shot. Final dimensions: 60 feet high, 250 feet wide, 260 feet long.)
The result is a four-jokes-a-minute movie, in which Graham owns almost none of the laughs.
"It's not about me," she explains. "The movie's not about the wife. It's somewhat about the family. The best I wanted to do is really connect to him and make that relationship as believable as possible in a small number of scenes. . . . For me, the job is totally enjoyable and worth it."
Running around with three sons and a few hundred animals waiting to board the ark, Graham exudes the same casual sexiness that defined her aesthetic in "Gilmore Girls," just none of the wit, none of the sass.
When they taped the final episode of that show, there was no certainty it would be final. Graham, 40, who grew up in Northern Virginia and graduated from Langley High School, said she thought there was a 50 percent chance they'd all be back for one more season, so the thinking was, "Well, if this is the end, what would we like it to be?" she says.
And that, she admits, is a strange way to say goodbye to a job that has been central to her career and her life for the better part of a decade.
There "would've been a difference if we'd known it was the end -- emotionally, psychologically and even creatively, I think," she says. But the pressure that comes with wrapping up a saga with such fervid audience loyalty is tremendous, she adds, so "in a way, it was a blessing to just kind of have a quiet exit."
There was a public mourning of the show's passing, when it did become official, writ large on fan Web sites and television message boards. For her part, Graham, who had a great deal of say in the decision not to continue for an eighth season, hasn't watched the last episode. Any of the last few episodes, really.
"Whatever Freud would say about that . . . it's so strange 'cause I went into another job, and right after this I'm going right into another job. And I don't have a huge amount of perspective about it yet," she explains.
If it was a fraught, risky choice to give up the show that had been her rock, it was also an intuitive one. Her thinking: "I have had that job. It's been a steady job. It has been a rock in a lot of ways, and that's totally reassuring and positive. But I was starting to get itchy -- creatively, and to have more time and a different kind of lifestyle."
The different kind of lifestyle came quickly. Graham hasn't been home in a month. Her stuff from "Gilmore Girls" is still sitting in boxes in her garage. She's set up in a trailer with walls so thin, everyone can hear what everyone else is saying. (Hence the decampment to the rental car for this interview.)
"But this is the actor's life that I kinda forgot about, which is you go where the work is and you're kind of a nomad and you're living in a hotel," she says. She expected more downtime to recover from the show, but in a way, moving on immediately has been just as restorative. "Anything new is fun," she says. "Every person you work with has a different creative process versus on a show, you kind of get down a routine."
Not that another show is an impossibility for Graham. She has gotten offers, for one thing. And: "You know what? Also, I think the best writing for women is in television," she says with some touch of matter-of-fact resignation.
Still, for now she's having fun. And she's having 15-minute lunch breaks that don't leave her much time to breathe. Good thing for Graham, that's never seemed necessary.
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Lorelai, about her dog: He's totally fine having his personal freedoms slowly stripped away,
as long as he's completely unaware that it's happening - just like a true American.Avatar by Mandasmal |