Milo Ventimiglia is looking back at Gilmore Girls with a fresh pair of eyes.
More than 20 years after the beloved series premiered, the actor is revealing his true thoughts about his bad boy character Jess Mariano. Specifically, Ventimiglia admitted to Jess' immaturity and reflected on why (spoiler alert) he wasn't the model boyfriend to Alexis Bledel's Rory Gilmore.
"Jess was a child," Ventimiglia told InStyle in an interview published Feb. 15. "I think Jess had a lot of life to live. And I don't think he was quite set up the best way in his younger years—not having a father, not having a parent. He had to find his way on his own a little bit."
That doesn't mean Jess wasn't self-aware, as Ventimiglia went on to suggest. The This Is Us alum noted, "I think he got to it a little quicker, just a place of... acceptance of who he was, and what he wanted to be, and who he wanted to be around."
It's not often that Ventimiglia—who reprised his character in the 2016 Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life miniseries—takes a walk down memory lane, but on occasion he's offered insight into Jess and Rory's controversial dynamic and why it just didn't work out between them.
"I think things are complicated when you're young," he previously said on a 2021 episode of the podcast I Am All In. "You're going through developmental change. You are seeing things in the world you've never seen before. You're experiencing things from the heart, from the gut, from the head, that you're experiencing for the first time."
Ventimiglia added that, for the high school lovers, "they were what they needed at the moment from each other."
For those not ready to leave Stars Hollow behind, click here for more secrets about Gilmore Girls.