14 little-known secrets about Lorelai Gilmore even die-hard 'Gilmore Girls' fans may have missed

We know that Lorelai was named after her father's very outspoken mother, but we only hear her middle name once in the series. 

After completing an associate degree in business, Lorelai attends her community-college graduation, where her name is read aloud as Lorelai Victoria Gilmore.

Lorelai makes multiple references to the Bangles throughout the series.

When Rory's teacher Max first suggests that he and Lorelai should date because they both want to, she proclaims, "Well I want to be in the Bangles but that doesn't mean I quit my job and get a guitar and ruin my life to be a Bangle, does it?"

On season two, she also goes to a Bangles concert with Rory and even mentions that she almost named Rory after the band's lead singer, Susanna Hoffs.

Lorelai is played by Lauren Graham for the entirety of the show, with the exception of one episode. 

On season three, episode 13, "Dear Emily and Richard," there are several flashback scenes of teen Lorelai (played by Chelsea Brummet) and Christopher around the time she found out she was pregnant with Rory.

When Graham auditioned to play Lorelai, she was also committed to another show.

In her 2016 memoir, "Talking as Fast as I Can," she said she shot the "Gilmore Girls" pilot in the hopes that her other show, NBC's "Don Rooses' M.Y.O.B.," wouldn't work out. 

Luckily for all "Gilmore Girls" fans, the NBC show was canceled, leaving her open to take the role.

When Max abruptly proposes to Lorelai on season one, she says, "It should be magical. There should be 1,000 yellow daisies." 

Max takes the comment to heart and orders daisies to be delivered to the Independence Inn, where Lorelai works.

Cocreator Amy Sherman-Palladino told Entertainment Weekly in 2014, that the production team quickly learned that 1,000 daisies don't actually fill a room. They ended up using "thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands" of flowers for the scene.

Lorelai always seems to know what she wants and how to go after it. So perhaps unsurprisingly, she made the first move with Rory's dad, Christopher. 

They'd known each other since they were 6, but Christopher tells Rory that when they were teenagers, Lorelai walked up and kissed him out of nowhere.

Christopher also said that became the best day of his life.

When Jason "Digger" Stiles reenters Lorelai's life on season four, he tells a story about going to summer camp with Lorelai.

He said that one summer, Lorelai fell out of a canoe, got her shirt wet, and subsequently got the nickname "Umlauts" for the rest of the summer. 

Although it's not explicitly said, since an umlaut is a German accent mark that appears as two dots over a vowel, many fans have speculated that it's a reference to Lorelai's visible nipples after the fall. 

One of the most notable things about "Gilmore Girls" is how much and how fast the characters talk.

Sherman-Palladino and her husband Dan Palladino told The New York Times in 2020 that the scripts were typically 20 pages longer than similar shows because of how much dialogue was packed into them. 

That reportedly led both Graham and Scott Patterson, who played Luke Danes, to quit smoking for their roles. 

"She needed her wind," Patterson told The New York Times for the same 2020 feature. "And I needed my wind."

The scripts are so packed with pop-culture references and tidbits about the characters that a few inconsistencies are bound to slip in every once in a while.

Fans have pointed out that one of the flaws has to do with Lorelai's pregnancy with Rory.

Lorelai said she stopped being a kid "the moment the stick turned pink." But that kind of lateral flow at-home pregnancy test wasn't invented until 1988, and it didn't become common until the 1990s. 

Rory was 16 at the beginning of the show, which aired in 2000, and her birthday is October 8 — meaning she was likely conceived around January 1984.

On season five, episode 21, "Blame Booze and Melville," Lorelai thinks she might be pregnant after a night of unprotected sex with Luke.

Her one symptom is craving an apple, which apparently hasn't happened since she was pregnant with Rory. 

She didn't turn out to be pregnant and went back to her junk-food habit. But the creators still used that fact to tease a pregnancy in the 2016 Netflix revival "Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life," by posting a plate of Pop-Tarts around a single apple on Instagram.

Gypsy (played by Rose Abdoo) is the Stars Hollow mechanic and a notoriously sarcastic character.

We don't know much about her life in the town, but Abdoo has shared some things about the character. 

Per Marie Claire, at the 2016 Gilmore Girls Fan Fest, Abdoo revealed that Gypsy is gay and has a crush on Lorelai.

Fans disagree on many moments on the show, and one of the most contentious is Christoper and Lorelai's marriage on season seven. 

Apparently, Graham felt the same way — so much so that she actually forgot it happened at all. She told EW in 2016 that someone had to remind her that Lorelai got married.

"It just seemed so out of character that I literally blocked it from my memory," she said. "That was my season 7 experience."

Lorelai and Rory are constantly drinking coffee, mostly at Luke's Diner, throughout the show.

On a 2016 episode of "The Late Show With Stephan Colbert," Graham said, "I want to tell you one thing. It is a true thing. There is always coffee in my cup."

But she also told EW in 2015 that she drank so much coffee that she sometimes swapped it out for water while filming scenes. 

"If I had any more, I was going to keel over dead," Graham said. 

Richard Gilmore's funeral on "A Year in the Life" is a heartbreaking scene for viewers. And it was apparently equally heartbreaking for the actors since actor Edward Hermann died in 2014. 

On the final episode of the miniseries, Lorelai struggles to come up with a positive memory of her father, as the two had a strained relationship. Eventually, she lands on an anecdote of her 13th birthday.

After getting her heart broken and facing ridicule at school, she ditched and went to the mall. Richard found her there, bought her snacks, and took her to the movies. 

She tells her mother that was her favorite birthday. 

This story was originally published in October 2022 and most recently updated on October 22, 2024.