My, how Doyle has grown up. Photo: Alison Buck/Getty Images

“So, Doyle and Paris are married now in the Gilmore Girls reboot?” Vulture casually asked Empire co-creator Danny Strong when we ran into him at a party celebrating Forest Whitaker’s Broadway debut in Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie on Thursday. It almost worked. “That was very tricky of you,” said Strong, who reprises his character, the loyal Doyle McMaster. “Verrrry clever, my friend, how you tried to get that in there, but I can’t give any spoilers away.”



However, he was effusive about his reunion with Liza Weil, the How to Get Away With Murder star who plays his girlfriend on the show, Paris Geller. “I was so happy to see Liza again, and it was as if no time had passed,” Strong said. “Liza and I were joking around, literally, as if we had been shooting the day before, that it hadn’t been ten years. And she’s just hilarious, so we had a blast.”

And there’s the rest of the cast. “Alexis [Bledel] is as sweet as ever, Lauren Graham I loved seeing, and [creators] Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino. I really adore them, so it was awesome to get to work together. And Dan directed the episode, and he had never directed me when I was on the show back in the day, so it was awesome to work with him in that capacity.”



However, it wasn’t exactly a hug-fest when they all first gathered on the set, because they’d all reunited a few months before, at the ATX Festival. “And that was amazing, because I hadn’t seen many of these people in a decade,” Strong said. “But it was still fun being at the table-read. You know, you’re at a table read, and the cast of Gilmore Girls is all there, and we’re reading a Gilmore Girls script!” And, he promises, the new scripts are “fantastic.” “Amy and Dan wrote all of them, and they’re really good, I think people are going really like them. So it was just this kind of neat vibe, of like, wow, we’re all sitting at a table reading a Gilmore script.”

Strong credits the show’s current popularity to the way we watch television today, with Netflix, DVDs, and the like. “It’s just as if the shows, for many people, are as if they just watched them that day. And in many cases, they have. For Gilmore Girls, I feel like people like it now as much as they did when we were on the air, so they come up to me and they’re just as passionate about the show now.”