Lauren Graham Remembers The Time Rita Moreno Told Her, “Don’t Whine”
Beloved Gilmore Girls mom Lauren Graham was on Jimmy Kimmel Live last night, promoting her new show The Z-Suite on Tubi. She also reflected on how popular Gilmore Girls has become in recent years — and remembered a moment on an early job when stage and screen legend Rita Moreno may have told her to stop whining.
Jimmy Kimmel noted that the popular Amy Sherman-Palladino drama, which brought Graham fame for her role as a single mother raising a precocious daughter in small-town New England, is having its 25th anniversary, and continues to gain new fans every year; it is also one of the most rewatched series on Netflix.
“It might be more popular now than when it was on the air the first time,” Kimmel noted of its growing success since being acquired by Netflix. “We have definitely reached more people than we were reaching on the WB,” Graham replied.
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“How frequently are you hearing about this?” he asked her, noting that several of his relatives were huge fans and that entire new generations were getting hooked on the show. “Frequently,” Graham said. “I am hearing about it frequently. I get stopped a lot. It surprises me every time though, I don’t know why.” Graham also noted that she doesn’t get residuals from Netflix viewings of the show, and joked that she gets “paid in love.”
It was also revealed that Graham’s new show — in which she plays an older C-suite exec who must contend with new Gen Z coworkers — has made her something of an elder stateswoman to the younger cast members. “The kids are younger. They think I know things. They ask my advice about stuff,” Graham said.
Did Graham ask her older costars for advice when she was starting out? “I think I thought that the way you start a career is to pretend that you know more than you do, and never admit to anyone that you don’t know what you’re doing,” Graham laughed, and then recalled an early gig shooting a pilot with acting legend Rita Moreno.
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Graham, who played a lawyer in the pilot, was delivering a monologue to Moreno’s character, a judge. “In the middle of one of my speeches — it’s a half hour sitcom — she goes, ‘Don’t whine.’ And I was like, ‘Is that a line of hers? Is that a note she’s giving me? Is that something just in general for life?'”
She never asked Moreno for clarification, “because I was pretending like I knew what I was doing.” After revealing that the line was not in the script, Kimmel quipped, “Sounds like you may have been whining.”
For the whole interview, check out the video below. And if you haven’t seen Gilmore Girls, check it out on Netflix! You can also watch her new show on the free streaming service Tubi.
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February 2021
1990s Rom-Coms
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