‘Gilmore Girls’: Tricia O’Kelley Canceled Show Is Responsible for Nicole Leahy’s Red Hair
On Gilmore Girls, Tricia O’Kelley played Nicole Leahy, Luke (Scott Patterson)’s season 3 love interest. Obviously, Luke and Nicole were not meant to be. Luke and Lorelai (Lauren Graham) were the long term romance of the show. But, while it lasted, Nicole had red hair. O’Kelley reveals this was entirely due to a show she was on prior to Gilmore Girls that got canceled.
O’Kelley was a guest on Patterson’s I Am All In podcast on July 13. They reminisced about their Gilmore Girls scenes. She explained how Nicole’s red hair came from her previous show, That Was Then. It lasted another year while she was on Gilmore Girls.
The canceled show that made Tricia O’Kelley dye her hair red
That Was Then was one of two time travel shows to premiere in the 2002 season. Neither that nor Do Over lasted an entire season. That Was Then also starred Kiele Sanchez, long before she was on Lost. So the producers made O’Kelley go red to distinguish the female leads.
“My show, series, was canceled one day,” O’Kelley said on I Am All In. “And then the next day was my audition for Gilmore Girls. I had to have red hair for the series because the other leading female was blonde hair, same length, everything. So I had to dye my hair red and I hated it.”
‘Gilmore Girls’ inherited Tricia O’Kelley’s red hair
The good news for O’Kelley was that she had a Gilmore Girls audition when ABC pulled the plug on That Was Then. The bad news was they loved her That Was Then hair. So Nicole became the fiery redhead standing between Luke and Lorelai.
“And then didn’t have time to change it back, auditioned for Gilmore Girls with my red hair, and then got the job,” O’Kelley said. “And then had to keep the red hair for a year or however long we shot.”
The ‘Gilmore Girls’ experience made up for the hair dye
Despite extending her red hair by a year, O’Kelley wouldn’t change anything. She loved her role on Gilmore Girls.
“My first thought was oh crap, I have the red hair,” O’Kelley said. “I was thrilled to get the job. I remember feeling like it’s so up my alley because I was always getting the note that I was talking too fast on previous jobs that I worked on. Specifically for this audition it’s like super fast, fast paced, speed through it. I was like oh thank God. So I remember feeling like I was very in my element.”
O’Kelley also felt the Gilmore Girls scripts elevated her performance.
Just that the text, the actual words on the page, it was like doing Shakespeare. They were so perfectly written that you couldn’t screw up. You couldn’t ad lib an um or whatever. The words were so perfectly written when you got the page that there was no room for any sort of screw up or any sort of ad lib. So I remember feeling a lot of pressure and at the same time thinking these guys do monologues and monologues of that every single day. I’ve just got this little chunk. Surely I could handle it. I remember everyone being super nice and then I had so much fun with you.
Tricia O’Kelley, I Am All In, 7/13/22
