Gilmore Girls: Michael Winters Reflects on the Role of Taylor Doose [Interview]

For a lot of Gilmore Girls fans, this time of year makes them feel like re-watching the series, and with good reason.

UPtv knows this all too well and is bringing back its annual Gilmore the Merrier — a Gilmore Girls “binge-a-thon” beginning on November 21st, where they’ll air every single episode, plus the entirety of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. This year, the event is being hosted by Michael Winters, who played the iconic character of Taylor Doose. 

I had the chance to speak with Winters about hosting Gilmore the Merrier, plus some of his favorite memories of working on Gilmore Girls and some fun behind-the-scenes details about the series. (You can watch the full interview below.)

Winters was excited to be a part of this year’s binge-a-thon, which he hadn’t heard about until he was approached to host this year. 

“It sounds really fun and apparently, it’s a huge hit. People love it. So I was so glad to be a part of it. They came here, got a crew up here, and we shot for one whole day, and did all these little introductions,” Winters said.

“It was almost like the reboot where we were all so happy to see each other again. It was nostalgic for those of us who did it, who spent so many years doing it.”

Speaking of the revival series, I asked Winters what it was like coming back after all of that time for Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.

“It had everything going for it. We were all back together. We were all employed — we loved that. We had been apart for several years, between the end of the real season and the reboot, and everybody was back, except Ed Herrmann of course, who had passed away. But it was just joyful.”

Winters also said he didn’t expect to be a part of Gilmore Girls for as long as he was. Initially, he expected to only be in four episodes.

“It was a typical Los Angeles thing for an actor. It was an audition that was set for a four-episode arc with a possibility of recurring. Well, they always tell you that. They always would say that — it would never happen,” he said.

“So that was this again, and I didn’t even think about, and then next thing I knew, they’re saying well, can you come back?”

Watch the full interview with Michael Winters:

Any Gilmore Girls fan knows that the actors were tasked with heavy dialogue spoken at a fast pace. Winters shared what that was like for him, including one particularly memorable episode.

“It’s challenging, mainly because I’m used to the theater where you have a long time to rehearse. So you have time to know exactly what you’re doing [and] spend a lot of time learning the language. These? No. You show up. You know the words,” he said.

He then recalled the dialogue he had for Gilmore Girls Season 4 Episode 7, “The Festival of Living Art.”

“I was the master of ceremonies for that, so it meant that I had to introduce all of the pictures,” he said. “But what they did was they shot all the tableau first, and I sat around, literally, literally all night long in a tuxedo, waiting. And it was cold.”

“Then at the end of all of that, they let everybody go, and I’m left to do all of the announcements in a row, full of Italian names,” Winters continued. “I got up there at the podium to do them, and the director said, ‘Now I don’t want to make you nervous, but the sun is going to come up in about twenty minutes and we need to get this all shot because the sun’s going to be right in your face.'”

One of Winters’ most memorable scenes from the series, though, is from Gilmore Girls Season 5 Episode 4, when Jackson runs against Taylor for Town Selectman. He described the scene where we see him through the window of the Soda Shoppe, knowing that the election isn’t going well for him.

“I’m sitting there in the dark, slumped over,” he said. “I’m obviously very unhappy about the way things are going, and then from the bottom of the frame, I pick up a can of Reddi-Wip, and just spray a whole thing of it in my mouth to make myself feel better. It was great. It had no dialogue — it just had that one shot, but that’s one of the things I remember most.”

Winters also remembered a time when the writers worked quickly to add in a change for him after he’d suffered an injury.

“I was in Seattle. I’d been doing a play, and I was about to go back down and do the first episode, and I fell and I broke my foot. And so I called them and I said, ‘I’m about to get in the car to drive down there, and I don’t know how well I can walk,'” he recalled.

“By the time I got there, they had written in a fact that I had slipped on a banana peel that somebody had left on my doorstep or something, and got me an electric wheelchair.”

Overall, Winters said one of the best things about working on the series was working with Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino.

“When I went to work, I knew I was going to work on quality stuff. That it was not going to be junk. That they cared about it,” he said. “They were just so into what they were doing. They were really married to it.”

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Don’t miss Gilmore the Merrier, the Gilmore Girls binge-a-thon beginning Monday, November 21st at 10am ET on UPtv.

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