We already know that squabbling Gilmore Girls characters Luke and Lorelai—who ended the series with a kiss—are still together in the new Netflix revival. (Thanks for easing our minds, promo photos!) So the big question still plaguing some fans of the original show centers on young Rory Gilmore, who made a series of increasingly bad romantic decisions over the course of seven years. And now the actor who played Rory’s first love, Jared Padalecki, is dropping some tantalizing clues.
We already knew that Rory would probably not end up with Padalecki’s Dean. Common sense and a slip of the tongue from the actor who played Rory’s fictional father, David Sutcliffe, made that pretty clear. And in a new interview, Padalecki confirmed to US Weekly that, thanks to his hectic Supernatural schedule, he only spent one day on the Stars Hollow set. (Fun fact: Supernatural premiered when Gilmore Girls was in its fifth season and, 11 years later, the popular CW show is still going.)
Padalecki said that his one scene is set in Dean’s old work place, Doose’s Market. It gave Padalecki a “good amount of stuff” to do and “explained a lot” about what his character had been up to. The scene, he claims, gives Dean some closure, which is a relief. The last time Padalecki appeared on the show was a really sad and bitter Season 5 scene in which the freshly jilted Dean warned Luke that men like them would never be good enough for the Gilmore women. It sounds like poor Dean gets a happier ending here. Something, I imagine, akin to Carrie’s final Season 6 encounter with John Corbett’s Aidan on Sex in the City. (We all pretend Sex and the City 2 didn’t happen, right?)
“There will always be some fans who are unhappy, but I think they’ll be pleased with it,” Padalecki says, with the canny insight of an actor who has spent over a decade on a hugely popular show. But, he adds, “[creator] Amy [Sherman-Palladino] didn’t come back to fuck it up—she came back to do it right, and she did it right.”
That one brief Dean scene might not have been all series creator Sherman-Palladino had in mind. Back in February, she told TVLine that she had to curb some of her loftier ambitions for the revival. “We’ve had certain storylines we had to [tweak] because, apparently, there are still budgetary restrictions in Hollywood. I don’t understand that. I sort of feel like, ‘This is the story I want to tell, and somebody should just pay for it.’ Apparently, it doesn’t work like that. Very irritating. So, certain storylines—one of which involved one of the boys—had been taken out of our hands.” Of the actors playing Rory’s three main love interests, Padalecki—Supernatural star that he is—would be the one likely to command the most money.
But the other two guys, played by Matt Czuchry and Milo Ventimiglia, will also be on the scene to potentially vie for Rory’s affection. Rory, Sherman-Palladino assures us, “is single in the sense that she’s not married. But she’s dating like any young woman with that face would be.”
Of course, all these questions about the many beaus of Rory Gilmore ignore the real love story at the center of the beloved show. This is, at the end of the day, a series that above all else celebrates the bond between mother and daughter. As long as Rory and Lorelai are together, the men will always take a backseat.
