Yahoo Movies Milo Ventimiglia says it's okay Rory and Jess didn't work out on Gilmore Girls
It was a rocky romantic road for Alexis Bledel's Rory and Milo Ventimiglia's Jess on the beloved TV series Gilmore Girls, but Ventimiglia recently revealed that he looks back on the characters' time together fondly and is okay that they didn't get a traditional happy ending.
"It's been a while since I've thought about Jess and Rory's relationship," Ventimiglia said during an appearance on his Gilmore Girls costar Scott Patterson's podcast I Am All In. "I know people always ask me questions about it, but I think, you know, things are complicated when you're young. I think we can all understand this, I think we can all appreciate it. You're going through developmental change. You are seeing things in the world you've never seen before. You're experiencing things like from the heart, from the gut, from the head that you're experiencing for the first time."
He added, "Jess and Rory, I think they were what they needed at the moment from each other. At the same time, you know, it didn't work out. They went in different directions, and that's okay too. That's kind of great."
Warner Bros. TV Alexis Bledel and Milo Ventimiglia on 'Gilmore Girls'
Ventimiglia also said he appreciated the special bond Jess and Rory developed as teens and took into adulthood as they matured.
"I think what I did always appreciate about the two of them was they — outside of what anybody wanted to put onto those two — they kind of made their own world," he said. "And I think that's pretty cool. There's always going to be outside influence to tell you how to behave, what to do, what to look for, what are the pitfalls, what are the glories — 'Hey, this what I did when I was your age!' But really, that's just people giving you their version of what they think your life should be. So I think Jess and Rory really kind of found their own world and created their own world, and it lasted just beyond them romantically as teenagers to where they had an actual friendship as they became young adults."
Ventimiglia returned to Stars Hollow for the 2016 Netflix miniseries Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, reprising the role of Jess. And when Patterson asked if he'd be interested in doing more Gilmore Girls, the This is Us star said he was open to exploring the idea.
"The thing is this, I can't ever get away from it," Ventimiglia said. "For me, knowing that like you, Lauren [Graham], Alexis, and probably just about everybody else in the show would show up, and on top of it, it'd probably be Dan [Palladino] and Amy [Sherman-Palladino] there writing their asses off, it's like, yeah, why wouldn't I?"
There's just one caveat: Ventimiglia would want to know there was "more story to tell."
"Have these characters grown to a point where we actually really want to see more of them?" he said. "You want to understand where they've been. We're going to discover something new. So I think if they did want to bring it back, and if it was Amy and Dan at the helm, and you guys were all showing up, I'd be a jerk not to show up."
Listen to Ventimiglia on the podcast above.
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