Australian actor Tanc Sade worked 52 hours straight just to reprise his role as Finn on the upcoming return of Gilmore Girls.

Sade endured the gruelling hours – working two jobs at once – to come back to a show that he, and every other cast member, held dear.

“I said to my team, ‘I’m doing Gilmore Girls no matter what. There’s no way I’ll miss it’, because I owed it to the story. The story is bigger than the sum of its parts,” Sade told AAP.

“It was an honour to be a part of that series. I still get fan mail every day for that show, a big portion of my fan base is from Gilmore Girls.”

The show gave the Sydney actor his big break in the US, when he was cast in season five and six as the wild Australian Yale student, Finn, a friend of Rory’s boyfriend Logan. Sade moved heaven and earth for the chance to return to his character when the show’s first new season in nine years was given the go-ahead by Netflix – never mind the fact that he had just signed on to a lead role in director Cameron Crowe’s series, Roadies.

“In the end I was doing night shoots on Gilmore Girls and then wrapping and going straight from Gilmore Girls to Roadies,” he said.

“I did a 52-hour shift and I don’t drink caffeine, nor do I do drugs, so the make-up artist did a great job, and the cinematographers were really good with lighting.”

One scene on Gilmore Girls was particularly difficult and required a lot from the exhausted actor.

“My very last scene required a lot of dexterity and it involved a lot of things happening, and I did feel quite punch-drunk at that stage,” he said. “But it was good.”

For Sade’s character, he says not too much has changed.

“He’s just as, if not more, debaucherous, and he’s very fun-loving,” he said.

His wild character has even spawned a craze among some fans.

“I know there’s a quote that I have from one of the episodes that has been tattooed on many a fan’s arm that I’ve seen: In Omnia Paratus – and there’s an umbrella from the episode,” he said. In the episode, Logan, Finn and their friends convince Rory Gilmore to leap from seven-story scaffolding, a ritual of the Yale secret society called the Life and Death Brigade.

Of his fans, Sade said: “The tattoos freak me out a little bit, but I’ve also had people say they’ve named their kids after Finn and I’ve thought, ‘Why would you want to name your kid after a laconic drunk? But if that’s your choice then go ahead’.”

In an interview with Studio Ten on Tuesday, Sade said the reboot would “be better. It will meet all of the expectations.”

“Amy [Palladino, the creator of Gilmore Girls] famously said she knew what the last four words of Gilmore Girls would be. And she never got to say them because she wasn’t on the seventh series. So for a lot of fans this is a very big deal, that she’s getting to finish the show in the way that she wanted to.”

The Gilmore Girls screening date has not yet been revealed, but in the meantime Sade can be seen playing the part of singer-songwriter Christopher House on Roadies, which has just premiered in the US and Australia.

“I’ve done a lot of other shows in the US that have been great, but I knew that Roadies was something special,” he told AAP. “I feel very, very fortunate.”