Alexis Bledel Says She Had an ‘Attitude’ During Her Original ‘Gilmore Girls’ Audition

Alexis Bledel is currently killing it on the hit Hulu show The Handmaid’s Tale, but most people know her as the whip-smart Rory Gilmore from Gilmore Girls. For seven seasons—and one Netflix reboot—we watched Rory grow from a timid Harvard hopeful to a professional writer living in Brooklyn. (Of course, I’m leaving out some other important details, but this is a spoiler-free post.) It’s hard to imagine anyone else playing Rory, to be honest.

And now she’s revealing how she landed it. In a recent appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers, Bledel opened up about her original audition experience for Gilmore Girls, which was unusual to say the least.

“I was very sick,” Bledel said. “I was a student at NYU, and they kept calling me back up to audition. I think I went, like, six times.”

Bledel admits she wasn’t a “very seasoned” actor at this time and didn’t know how the casting process worked. This lack of experience made her get very annoyed by how many times the GG producers were making her screen test.

“I grew a tad bit impatient,” she said. “I had a little attitude. And our boss [Amy Sherman-Palladino] really liked that a lot. She [was] like, ‘That’s our girl!’ And I was like, ‘Are you guys gonna bring me back?’ She was like, ‘I like that [the attitude]. That’s perfect.'”

Watch Bledel tell this story for yourself, below:

We totally see how Bledel’s “attitude” helped her get this role. Rory is largely viewed as this sweet, innocent character, but she actually has a lot of fight in her—especially during the latter half of the series. Palladino had to make sure Bledel was up for the challenge—and she nailed it, in true Gilmore fashion.

RELATED: Alexis Bledel Speaks Out About the Possibility of Another Gilmore Girls Season