Lauren Graham:

“Gilmore Girl” to Woman

by Lynn B

We all knew and enjoyed pretty Lauren Graham as hip mom Lorelai on the popular TV series “The Gilmore Girls”. According to the Teen Choice Awards, she is a “Choice Parental Unit”. Since her long-running show has come to an end, Lauren is stretching her wings again in the feature film world. You might have caught her costarring with Mandy Moore in Because I Said So or earlier in The Pacifier with Vin Diesel or Bad Santa with Billy Bob Thornton.

Lauren has several roles as a responsible wife and mom coming up and this week you can catch her as wife to Steve Carell in the comedy Evan Almighty. We got to chat with Lauren recently on the Universal Studios lot. She was very chic in a cream knit sweater with puffy sleeves, a cute gold necklace, gold flats and skinny jeans. Learn all about “Toothy the alpaca”, what it’s like to work with funnyguy Steve, an arkfull of animals and move on from one of the most successful TV series of all time!

AGW: What were the biggest challenges in being cast as the wife in a movie like this?

Lauren: Well, I love movies like this and I think somebody has to be the straight man. One of the things I liked about this movie was the heart of it, and the sort of emotional, real story of this man who seems to be going crazy. No one believes him, and I think that's an important part of the story. I have had years and years of talking fast and being sassy, and I'm as happy to do something simpler. [laughs] So it's not about trying to turn it into something else, it's just trying to do a good job with what this is. So that's what I tried to do.

AGW: Your name is Joan. Did they joke about a ‘Joan of Ark’ reference?

Lauren: [laughs] No, it didn't occur to me until somebody said it to me. And then of course, my grandmother, who knows every book of the Bible, was like, ‘Well, her name was Sarah [Noah’s wife], so I don't know why they called her Joan’.

AGW: If someone you cared about went supposedly nuts as Steve does as your husband in this film, how would you deal with it? Would you stick with them or bail?

Lauren: Well, I think I kind of go through all the colors in this because you want to believe them, you look for a rational explanation, you finally decide you can't take it anymore, and then Morgan Freeman [playing God] is your waiter and he tells you what to do. That's pretty much how I hope it would go. I don't know. You can't possibly know. I think the movie raises the question of, ‘How far will your faith take you? What do you do in the face of doubt? Is the power of love enough to get over what you perceive to be the reality of something?’ And I don't know the answers to all those questions. But we ask them here, in this little PG movie! [laughs] It makes you think!

AGW: What was working with Morgan Freeman as God like?

Lauren: I love that scene. It was a new way to say something really simple. I just loved the message of that scene, which is ‘just because you believe in something and ask for help doesn't mean you get it handed to you. It's still your job as a person to figure things out for yourself’. He's an impressive person to be around. He's just really cool. He sassed me and I kind of sassed him back and he was like 'this one can stay.' And I was like 'cool. I got him.' But I was like shaking because you don't want to be sassy to someone you respect unless you know that's the only way that they will respect you. He's funny. He's really comfortable in his skin so he just likes to play around.

AGW: What was like working opposite Steve Carell, and what did you think of his various stages of turning into a Noah-style character?

Lauren: I got so used to seeing him in that stuff every day that he would just look weird when you saw him without it. [laughs] We sort of had the more dramatic scenes in the movie, so I wasn't like holding my sides laughing during them because that wasn't the tone of the scene. But he's a very funny guy. I really appreciate how he approaches things. He's a real actor, you know? I liked his work in 40-Year-Old Virgin because I thought, ‘This is so interesting. It's so small and subtle, and he's coming from the character. He's not coming from like, 'I'm doing something wacky and big!'" And I just like that. So it was fun.

AGW: What were your encounters with the animals you worked with like?

Lauren: My interaction with the animals was more watching these trainers get them kindly and very simply to do what they wanted them to do. Because I just thought, ‘These giraffes have not been training to do Evan Almighty like their whole lives. How do they know to bring him the hammer?’ So much of the stuff is real that you see in the movie. So that was really amazing. We weren't like sitting around petting the lions or anything, but it was cool to watch them walk by. [laughs] You're like sitting drinking coffee, and you just got strangely used to it. But I didn't like sit down and talk to anybody. The animal we dealt the most with was Toothy the alpaca, who had an underbite.

AGW: Was he your favorite?

Lauren: He's our favorite! He has this huge underbite, and he was really unattractive. And I think we made the trainers mad because we called him Toothy and that's not his name. But the little boys [who play Lauren’s sons] got really into Toothy as like a mythical figure, even though he was right there. They'd be like, ‘Do you think Toothy knows we're rolling? Do you think Toothy knows we're home?’ [laughs] And we'd be at dinner, and they'd be like, ‘What do you think Toothy's eating for dinner?’ So he was the one that somehow, because of his unusual appearance, struck gold in our hearts. [laughs] We loved Toothy!

AGW: There weren’t as many animals as it looked like there were in the movie, right?

Lauren: When I see the movie there are thousands of animals. When I did the movie, there were five. When I see the movie, there's a huge amount of water. When I did the movie, there was a hose. But there was enough that you weren't just creating something out of nothing, but it was all new to me [the CGI animals and effects].

AGW: What are the movies you have coming up?

Lauren: Well this movie I'm doing right now is called Laws of Motion. It's an independent film that the playwright Craig Lucas is directing and Hilary Swank is a producer on it and has a supporting part in it just to lend her name to it. It's the story of a dysfunctional family and Matthew Perry is my husband and we have sort of a quiet marriage that is in trouble and his brother and sister come to stay with us to disastrous results. It’s a kind of dark comedy.

AGW: Who do you play?

Lauren: It's a very conservative, preppy shut down character who is just trying to be nice to these people who she thinks are freaks. And so that's a cool kind of different place to be. And then the next thing is. Humm, I'm doing a wife world tour. I don't know if you could tell. I'm playing Greg Kinnear's wife in a movie about the man who invented the intermittent windshield wiper and it's based on a true story. He felt that his patent was stolen by the car companies and he in real life spent his life fighting for the rights of inventors. In that one I have five kids. The working title is Flash of Genius.

AGW: Now that you are doing more movies, do you have a pet project. You sing. How about a musical?

Lauren: Yeah. A musical would great. My favorite is ‘Anything Goes’ but I can’t sing that so I have to find something that I can actually do. I need an easier musical.

AGW: Was there a downside to playing Lorelai for so long?

Lauren: The only downside of having a steady job on television is, a couple years into the show, I was like, ‘There's some feeling that I miss. What is it?’ And it was kind of the unexpected, and not knowing what the next thing might be, or if I would get it or not get it. And so to begin to get back to that unknown, I'm sure after a while, it will drive me crazy, but for now, it feels really nice, and I'm doing a movie now, and I'm going to do something else in like a month, so I know what my next couple things are, and I'm just really excited to have different experiences. And I feel I've kind of earned that, you know? [laughs] I just am going to really enjoy the variety.

AGW: What were your emotions when the show ended?

Lauren: You know it was really mixed because I felt that the show was telling us it was over. I don't know what else there is to do here. And we all were feeling restless. But also you feel so attached. A project like that becomes a person. You want to leave the person in the right place or something. So it felt right. It felt like the right thing. It was one of the best jobs I ever had and so of course it was hard to leave. But then it was done I thought ‘oh, all right’.

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