To this day, Milo Ventimiglia is stunned by the level of (often lusty) fandom surrounding his Gilmore Girls character, Jess Mariano. And he has a few thoughts on why fans were, and still are, so into his book-loving bad boy.
"Still to this day, you know, it blows me away —the impact of the Jess character, how much everyone was in love with him and wanted to find a guy like Jess," he said in a new interview with W Magazine. "He was kind of trouble, you know." As much as the This Is Us star is amused by all the love Jess gets, he does kind of understand the appeal. And in his mind, it's all about the heartbreaker's carefully curated look.
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"He had good hair. He had that pompadour thing going, and he had dope jackets, and he always had a book in his back pocket," he said. "And I feel like, well, if you got that hair and you got a cool jacket and you got a book in your pocket, you must be good for a girl." (Rory would beg to differ.)
So, what TV character did Ventimiglia himself have a special place for in his heart growing up? "I think everybody had a crush on Alyssa Milano, on Who’s the Boss?" he told W. That never worked out for them, but Ventimiglia did get a little fantasy fulfillment when he co-starred with Milano in a movie — in which they played an engaged couple (the 2008 crime-thriller Pathology.) "[This] is the craziest part: she and I did a movie where she played my fiancée," he explained. "So the first part of the movie, I kind of had to get past [my crush]. And you know, it was a dark, fucked up movie."
But Ventimiglia did a good job of first concealing (and then getting over) his crush — and these days, the pair are friends. "I think I played it off pretty cool," he said. "You know, she became a friend — her and her husband, we’ve all been close friends. And they named their kid Milo." Sounds like a pretty happy coincidence to us.
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