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

In an exclusive excerpt from her new memoir, ‘The Third Gilmore Girl,’ Bishop recounts the moment that she landed her role as Emily on the beloved series

Looking back on her acclaimed career on the stage and screen, actress Kelly Bishop is 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.”

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While writing her upcoming memoir The Third Gilmore Girl, out Sept. 17 from Gallery Books, the Tony Award-winner, 80, was able to truly gain a retrospective on the good in her life — both professional and off-screen.

Born in Colorado and raised by a single mother, Jane, after her parents divorced, Bishop originally trained as a dancer. After moving to New York as a young adult, she began working in the theater, including originating the role of Sheila in the groundbreaking Broadway musical A Chorus Line — a role that was inspired by Bishop's own life.

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Bishop, however, always wanted to act, and the dream led to roles in projects like the classic film Dirty Dancing and the Prime Video series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Most beloved of those roles, perhaps, is that of Emily Gilmore, the wealthy, occasionally brooding matriarch on the WB and CW show Gilmore 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 from The Third Gilmore Girl below.

The call came from my agent, a man named Robert Attermann. I’d finally found an agent I could trust, respect and even socialize with and welcome into the family. Robert and I had been talking several times a day, as we always did at that time of year because of a Hollywood tradition called pilot season.

Pilot season was an early-spring ritual in which TV networks would order pilots from the dozens of scripts they received, cast them, shoot them, test them among focus groups and then either green- light them to extend into series, or unceremoniously dump them and move on. It was an annual flurry of activity — writers submitting pilot scripts; scripts that are given the go-ahead being passed along to talent agents; talent agents sending those scripts to clients who might be appropriate and available and we clients getting a pile of scripts to read and audition for if we were remotely interested, or just needed the paycheck whether we were interested or not.

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Pilot season of 2000 was the usual flurry. The series The Sopranos had 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 called Gilmore 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.

Related: Gilmore Girls' Kelly Bishop Reveals Which of Rory's Boyfriends Has Always Been Her Favorite: 'He Had a Manly Quality'

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.

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Rory. 16, sweet, well-mannered and a bit socially awkward. An excellent student with a passion for classic literature, and an aspiring journalist and foreign correspondent. Deeply appreciative of her friendship with her mother and of the challenges she’s gone through to raise her with so much love and so little family support—very much like the way I felt about my mother.

Emily, Lorelai’s mother. Married for decades to Richard, a  conservative, stoic insurance executive. Wealthy and socially prominent. Opinionated, rigid, hard to please, a woman I would never be friends with in real life. And except for the vast differences in their backgrounds, eerily similar to Mom’s mother, whom I exclusively called Louise. Somehow, in Louise’s eyes, it was apparently my mom’s fault that she was conceived when Louise was 16, and she openly resented her for it all her life. As far as Louise was concerned, Mom couldn’t do anything right, ever, while Mom always tried so hard to please her. I never could figure out what Louise thought she had to gain by deliberately withholding love and approval from such an amazing daughter.

Related: Emily Gilmore in Jeans?! Kelly Bishop Was Just as Surprised As You Were About the 'Gilmore Girls' Trailer

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.”

* * *

I was more excited than nervous when I took the train into New York City to tape my Gilmore Girls audition. 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.

Related: Head Back to Stars Hollow with These Gilmore Girls Books

I eventually learned that once upon a time, she was a talented aspiring dancer who’d turned down a job in the cast of an off-Broadway tour of the stage hit Cats to join the writing staff of the Roseanne TV series. When she was a child, she’d even studied at Ballet La Jeunesse in Toluca Lake, Calif., the same ballet school where I studied when Lee and I were in Los Angeles, so there was probably a strong intuitive connection between us from the moment we met.

I thought my audition went well, and I commuted home to New Jersey feeling cautiously optimistic about getting cast in Gilmore Girls. I knew there would be some waiting involved before I heard anything — as always, the executives in LA would have to watch, endlessly debate and flex their muscles about every audition tape, while I went on about my life in South Orange with my  husband and our pets and kept repeating one of my usual mantras: “If it’s meant to work out, it will. If it isn’t, it will just make me available for what I’m supposed to be doing instead.” (Sometimes it was reassuring; sometimes it wasn’t.)

But there’s waiting, and then there’s waiting. Robert checked in from time to time with meaningless “news” like: “They’re really interested, and, of course, if the interest continues, you’ll have to go to LA to audition for the network and studio executives,” and the equally unhelpful, “They want to get the roles of Lorelai and Rory locked down before they focus on casting the other regulars.”

Related: Gilmore Girls Writer on the Casting of Matt Czuchry: ‘I’ll Always Be Team Logan’

It seemed their first choice for Lorelai was an actress named Lauren Graham, who was working on something else and not immediately available. As for the role of Rory, they were considering a young newcomer named Alexis Bledel, but she’d given one good audition and one not-so-good audition, and they were having trouble making up their minds about her.

Finally, when the phone kept not ringing to schedule that  audition in Los Angeles, I gave up hope. If “the suits” were still on the fence about hiring me, they could have at least given me another shot at auditioning. But oh well. There was nothing more to do about it than I’d already done. The rest was up to them.

Or, to be more accurate, the rest, as it turned out, was up to Amy Sherman-Palladino.

The deafening silence was broken one afternoon by another call from Robert. He asked if I was sitting down. I lied and said I was.

“It seems you won’t be going to the West Coast after all,” he told me.

My heart sank, until he continued, “It won’t be necessary. They’re offering you the role of Emily in Gilmore Girls.”

I was too speechless to ask the obvious question: What happened to that supposedly mandatory audition for “the suits”?

Years later, Amy explained it to me.

“They kept throwing names at me for months,” she said. “But after I saw your first audition, I just kept saying, ‘No, I have my Emily.’”

Next thing I knew, with my brave, supportive husband cheering me on, I was boarding a plane to Toronto in early April 2000 to meet my castmates and embark on an adventure that would last longer, mean more to me and accompany me through more off-screen life changes than I could ever have anticipated.

THE THIRD GILMORE GIRL by Kelly Bishop. Copyright © 2024 by Kelly Bishop. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LCC. 

The Third Gilmore Girl will be published on Sept. 17 and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.

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