‘Gilmore Girls’ Dialogue Coach Played a Recurring Role in the Series, Too
Gilmore Girls is well known for its quick, quippy dialogue and pop culture references. But that doesn’t mean it was easy for the cast to rattle off the lightning-fast bits of dialogue that made the series so beloved. Read on for how the series had to hire a dialogue coach to help, what character he wound up playing on the show, and who among the cast was the best at handling the speed-talking.
The ‘Gilmore Girls’ scripts were enormous
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in 2016, actress Kelly Bishop, who played Emily, remembers when the series pilot script landed on her desk. The actress says that she kept “flipping it over” to look at the thickness of it. “It was too thick to be a sitcom,” Bishop said.
On average, the scripts for Gilmore Girls were about 80 pages long, contrary to the industry standard of around 40-50 pages. However, this is not unusual for Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino who also created the Emmy-award-winning series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (which commonly boasts scripts 10-15 pages longer than standard sitcom length).
To help, Gilmore Girls hired a dialogue coach, Bell, to keep the actors up to speed.
The dialogue coach played a character later in the series
Dialogue coach George Bell was brought in to help the cast deliver the lines at a very rapid pace because having more lines didn’t mean the show got more time. They had to fit the lines into the time they had. Sometimes, this would mean as many as 20 takes.
Later in the series, Bell even joined the cast on camera, playing Professor Bell to Rory Gilmore at Yale. In one particularly memorable scene, Bell is delivering a lecture when Logan Huntzberger interrupts to embarrass Rory with the help of his sidekicks, Colin and Finn.
Lauren Graham was the best at handling the dialogue
It comes as little surprise that Lorelai was Gilmore Girls’ best speed talker. According to Teen Vogue, when Bell was asked who was the best in the cast at handling the tricky lines.
As the resident coffee addict and free spirit in Gilmore Girls, Lorelai does everything fast including delivering tongue-twisting lines like, “I can’t stop drinking the coffee. I stop drinking the coffee, I stop doing the standing, walking, and words-putting-into-sentence-doing.”
The title prize didn’t come without sacrifice for Graham during her Gilmore Girls time though. In a 2020 interview with the New York Times (via E Online) actor Scott Patterson (who plays Luke Danes) revealed that in order to keep up with the dialogue, Graham gave up smoking. “She needed her wind, and I needed my wind,” said Patterson, who gave up the habit for the show as well.
Following her success on Gilmore Girls, Graham, who is also an accomplished author, named one of her books Talking as Fast as I Can… which is pretty darn fast.
