Star Scott Patterson on ‘chemistry’ with Lauren Graham, biggest revival ‘regret’

IT WASN’T the backwards baseball bat. It wasn’t the uniform flannel shirt. Not even sitting on the Luke’s Diner set could do the trick.

“I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel like him, and I knew it,” Scott Patterson recalls to The Hollywood Reporter.

Instead, when the actor was desperately seeking a way to tap back into his inner Luke Danes on his first day of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, it was a stroll around Stars Hollow that did the trick.

“I took a trip down memory lane. I just remembered the scenes I did here, how I felt here, kept walking, kept walking and then I got it. I came back in the diner and I was fine,” he says. “[It] took a little, I had to start the engine (laughs).”

Its understandable considering its been nearly a decade since Patterson hung up his hat and closed up shop at Luke’s Diner for good. But the time has to come (finally) to put a fresh pot of coffee on.

On Nov. 25, Netflix will release the long-awaited four-part revival to the family drama. Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life picks up nine years later and sees nearly the entire cast return to reprise their roles from the original WB turned CW drama. (Perhaps) more importantly, the new iteration welcomes creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband and executive producer Dan Palladino back into the fold. The two left over a contract dispute at the end of Gilmore Girls’s sixth season and the show was canceled a year later in the wake of poor reviews and falling ratings.

“I was very eager to do it,” Patterson said about signing back on. “They sent me three [scripts] right away and I read them very, very quickly I called Amy and said, ‘ Wow, wow, wow, wow.’ And then I eagerly awaited the fourth and when that came, I called her again, and I said, ‘F - ! Wow!’”

Patterson’s role in the revival comes just as his other career is heating up. In addition to roles in series such as Aliens in America, 90210 and The Event, Patterson has been recently been focused on his turning his lifelong passion for music into a second career. His band Smith Radio, which mixes rock, blues and punk, will release its debut single “Haha” just two days ahead of the release of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. However, Patterson said there was no hesitation about reprising his best-known role.

“I was really happy to come back because I’ve done a lot of jobs since and they just... this was always going to be the best job I ever had,” he says. “These were always going to be the best people that I was ever going to work with in television — not that I haven’t worked with some great people after the series ended — but this is the unique thing that it is. This is an iconic show.”

Just as Gilmore Girls was an iconic show, so was the show’s central couple of Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and Luke. After spending much of the last season of the original series estranged, the couple appeared headed for a possible