Gilmore Girls' Yanic Truesdale Is Here to Quell Your Revival Fears

Get scoop on what the first table read was like

By Jean Bentley Apr 29, 2016 8:00 PMTags
Yanic Truesdale, Gilmore GirlsThe WB/Richard Foreman

For any devoted Gilmore Girls fan, the euphoria from finding out that Netflix's reboot was very real and very much happening immediately lead to fear: can a sequel possibly live up to the glory of the original? Come on, we all sat through season seven. We know there are two roads this new project can take.

Yanic Truesdale, who plays snooty French concierge Michel (and, like pretty much every single other actor who appeared on the series, is reprising the role for Netflix), tells E! News that there were a lot of nerves in the room when the cast got together for the first table read of the as-yet-untitled new series. It had been nine years since the cast played those roles—would they still come naturally? Would it feel the same?

"At the table read, I could tell that everyone was kind of nervous. You have to read that part that you haven't done in so long, but very strangely enough, it's kind of still in you," he says. "Once you start saying those words it all comes back pretty quickly. It's pretty phenomenal."

So yes, you can exhale that sigh of relief now.

Although know-it-all Michel is a bit of a grump, IRL Truesdale is a sunny, friendly person. A peppier Michel would be terrifying, so it's a good thing Michel came back so naturally. "Strangely enough, I'm not a grumpy guy. Quite the opposite," Truesdale confesses.

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The WB/Scott Humbert

But he still loves the tough Michel. "You always have to defend your character and understand him from within. When I play Michel, I don't think, 'Oh, I've got to be grumpy today.' It's just that he's someone, like many French people, who is set in his ways and believes his ways are the best. He's just very professional, has very high standards and very few people can meet his standards. So he's just irritated and annoyed at times, but it's for the best of the hotel or for Lorelai's best."

Michel is thinking, "it's always for their best, they don't know better! Let me explain it to them," Truesdale says. "[It's] the desire to be right all the time."

Walking back into Stars Hollow and seeing the Dragonfly Inn sets again after so many years was odd—"There's a very strange feeling to it. It's like going back to a house that you grew up in," he says—but satisfying. "It's exciting because you have another shot that's something that was very meaningful and had impacted a lot of people. It's exciting to have something new to give to the fans!"

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Gilmore Girls Revival Photos: Return to Stars Hollow
The WB

Plus, because the cast reunited last June in Texas at the ATX TV festival, they got the initial conversations out of the way. "Because it had been a long time since I'd seen a lot of these actors, [ATX] was more like a high school reunion. But then because we had seen each other recently, it just felt nice to see each other again but not feeling that you have to catch up on eight years."

Storyline-wise, there wasn't much Truesdale could reveal (we tried!), but we did get a few tidbits: we'll see a little more of Michel's backstory, and he won't really be interacting with any of the new characters. He'll be at the Inn, working. "Michel has always been in his own universe with Lorelai and all that," Truesdale says, "so most of that remains true."

The Gilmore Girls reboot is set to hit Netflix later in 2016.

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