Gilmore Girls star Kelly Bishop talks Emily's jeans and more revival surprises

Netflix

Emily Gilmore is one of those women who seems to wake up fully dressed in a pantsuit with every hair intact. In fact, if it weren’t for that one Gilmore Girls episode where Lorelai barged in on Emily and Richard sleeping, we’d believe that to be true. Perhaps that’s why the Gilmore fans lost their minds when the first trailer for Netflix’s upcoming revival showed Emily Gilmore wearing a T-shirt and — wait for it — jeans!

“You would never see her like that, and that all gets explained pretty quickly in that scene,” Kelly Bishop says, before addressing the real issue: “They weren’t pretty were they? They weren’t well-fitting jeans.”

But Emily’s jeans are only one part of her grieving process — something that Bishop promises contains a couple of surprises. Having lost her husband, the recent widow is forced to figure out what’s next. “[Creator Amy Sherman-Palladino] takes Emily on such an interesting journey in the reboot, and sadly it’s probably much more interesting because of the fact that Edward Herrmann’s gone and I didn’t have him,” Bishop says.

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“I missed [Ed] on the set and I missed him as a friend, but in lieu of that, what they wrote for Emily as far as these four chapters go was really interesting stuff and I think really valid, so it gave me some good places to go that I hadn’t been with Emily.”

Watch EW Reunites: Gilmore Girls here now on the new People/Entertainment Weekly Network (PEN). Go to PEOPLE.com/PEN, or download the PEN app on Apple TV, Roku Players, Amazon Fire TV, Xumo, Chromecast, iOS, and Android devices.

Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life hits Netflix Friday, Nov. 25.