Jared Padalecki wasn’t even conscious for one of his most pivotal scenes in season 1 of Gilmore Girls.
“The hours on Gilmore Girls were pretty intense,” Padalecki, 43, says in Us Weekly’s exclusive sneak peek of Drink Coffee, Talk Fast, an upcoming fan-generated Gilmore Girls documentary supported by a Kickstarter campaign, which launched on Tuesday, September 30. “There was an episode where Dean and Rory go to Miss Patty’s and they fall asleep. It had been, like, an 18-hour shooting day and we literally just fell asleep.”
Padalecki played Dean, the first love of Alexis Bledel’s Rory on the series, which aired from 2000 to 2007. As he describes, their characters inadvertently fall asleep in episode 9 of season 1, “Rory’s Dance,” leading to a big blowout fight between Rory and her mom, Lorelai (Lauren Graham). Turns out, the sleeping portion of the episode didn’t take much acting.
“I remember somebody shaking my arm, and I’m like, ‘Oh, so I’m ready!’ They’re like, ‘No, no, we got the shot,’” Padalecki recalls in the doc, codirected by Meghna Balakumar and Kevin Konrad Hanna. “So when there’s the scene with Rory and Dean sleeping, we’re f***ing sleeping. It’s the best acting I’ve ever done because I wasn’t acting. I was asleep.”
He continued: “Leaving the lot, I pulled up at 4 a.m. to drive home and security didn’t ask. They were like, ‘Gilmore Girls?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ They were like, ‘Yeah, figures.’ And then I left.”
The Gilmore Girls cast and crew worked notoriously long hours to accommodate the fast-paced dialogue of the series. (Scott Cohen, who played Max on the show, told Us their scripts were around 90 pages long, while the normal hour-long show is typically 50-60 pages in length.)
As Dean, Padalecki was Rory’s first boyfriend on the series, but certainly not the last, leading fans to debate whether they’re Team Dean, Team Jess (Milo Ventimiglia) or Team Logan (Matt Czuchry).
Today, 25 years after its premiere, the actor has noticed a whole new generation of fans have started watching the series. He recalls one instance in particular when he was at a Willie Nelson show with his wife, when four girls in their early 20s approached him asking for a picture.
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“One of the four is looking at me like I have a thumb growing on my forehead or something,” he recalls in the documentary. “She’s like, ‘Yeah, I’ll take a picture. Why are my friends being so silly?’”
He continued: “The one who took the picture who doesn’t know who I am was like, ‘So, wait a second, you’re an actor?’ I was like, ‘Oh, yeah.’ ‘In Gilmore Girls?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ She was like, ‘I think I’ve heard of that show. What did you do on it?’ ‘I was one of the boyfriends.’ And she goes, ‘For the mom or the daughter?’ First time in my life. I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’”
While Rory’s character is just 15 years old when she meets Dean in the Gilmore Girls pilot, her mother, Lorelai, was in her mid-thirties.
“It was a humbling experience,” Padalecki jokes of the fan encounter.
