Why Actress Liza Weil Is So Proud of Her Role on ‘Gilmore Girls’

Gilmore Girls is set to return this month, and the famous characters who left our screens almost a decade ago are finally easing back into our conversations. Liza Weil, who portrayed the unique, trailblazing Paris Geller, is definitely aware of her character’s impact — on her own life and on the lives of the show’s fans.

“The thing that’s the most lovely to me, looking back at my time on Gilmore Girls, was how fortunate I was to be a young actor and to be on a show that made it really cool for girls to be smart,” Weil told Cosmopolitan. “There were a lot of beauty shows, teen soaps, a lot of attention on looking pretty and being sexualized. It was really a gift for me to not have to do that and to really be able to explore the real issues of what it is to grow up.”

But Paris wasn’t immediately the role model Weil ended up bringing to the screen: In the earlier years, Weil struggled with her characters’ mean dialogue. “In season one, it was hard. I do remember feeling like, oh gosh, what is the value of portraying a mean girl on television? I’m not sure if it was helping anybody. It didn’t feel good to do it. Once we started learning more about Paris, it really made sense to me very quickly.”

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She says she can relate to the part of Paris that made her initially come off as mean: “I think I can get a little passionate about things that I believe in and maybe that can be a little intense for people. And I think a lot of that stuff comes out of the need of wanting to belong, and being insecure and uncomfortable. Like all of us, [Paris] figured out who she was and became less apologetic about it.”

Weil also weighed in on the long-asked question: Dean, Jess or Logan? It turns out, like Amy Sherman-Palladino, she doesn’t think Gilmore Girls is about picking a boy. “I don’t know that when that show was on, if people were so focused on [Rory’s boyfriends]. I think that’s something that’s developed over time. I think like we were talking about it earlier, these are very strong women who don’t need men to go through life with or have them be a part of their identity; they’re very capable of standing on their own.”

Read the full interview at Cosmopolitan.com