The Emmy hopeful compares her “Gilmore Girls” and “Parenthood” roles, and explains the risk of sharing a personal connection with a fellow cast member.

Rare is the television actress, Edie Falco being one of the few, who can leap from one indelible lead role to another and somehow make us forget the first one. Lauren Graham has done just that in the past two seasons of the NBC family drama Parenthood. Leaving her chatty Gilmore Girls persona behind, Graham infuses the same likability she did as young mom Lorelai Gilmore on the WB/CW dramedy into Parenthood’s Sarah Braverman, whose heavy troubles — dealing with a deadbeat ex-husband, raising two hormone-heavy teens, living with Mom and Dad, to name a few — are at once heart-wrenching and totally relatable. Here, the Emmy hopeful, 44, reflects on her second round at TV motherhood, what it means to trust her showrunner and how Parenthood has turned her into someone “who can barely get through a scene without crying.”

The Hollywood Reporter: You don’t have kids and yet you’ve now played two iconic “Mom” roles. How do they compare?

Lauren Graham: Technically, they are completely different jobs. Gilmore Girls was so language-based, so technical. It was about committing something perfectly to memory, because there was no deviation from the script. In terms of stamina and having to memorize, Parenthood feels much more like my experiences of doing film, where the moments are smaller. It’s those small moments of listening, that’s where the show lives.

THR: How much prep time do you spend with your fellow actors and showrunner?

Graham: A lot. These are very special people to me. We start talking about the scripts the minute they come out, actually. And often we’re shooting two shows at a time, so they story-board it for us that way. This is even more important on this show because you’re shooting what’s going to happen in the next episode while you still haven’t finished what happens in this episode. We also have an unusually confident showrunner, Jason Katims, who knows when he can trust us to have some input and then knows when he wants things his way. He came to me at one point in the season and — he’d never said this to me before — “I really like this one speech as it is, and I would love it if it was just that way.” It was really nice.

THR: What was the toughest scene you filmed in Season 2?

Graham: Well, I haven’t even watched it yet, so I don’t know how it came out! But there were those scenes in the hospital after Mae [Whitman], who plays my daughter, had been in a car accident, which we shot on my birthday, actually. Just the idea of what had happened to her was so powerful. But it was interesting because Mae wasn’t even there that day. But just the idea of it was so vivid; my feelings for her are very real. I just had never really had that experience before as actor.

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Lorelei Gilmore would’ve cut to the chase – albeit in a thousand words and dozens of pop culture references fired off in 30 seconds – so we did, too: is there going to be a “Gilmore Girls” reunion?

“There are always discussions – It’s something that I’ve always been open to,” Lorelei herself, Lauren Graham, tells PopcornBiz, although no definitive plans for a reunion of the beloved CW show – which ended in 2007 after seven seasons – are afoot to her knowledge, despite rumors that resurface every few months.

“I think it’s something that if it’s done in the right way could be really wonderful,” says Graham. “I email with Amy [Sherman-Palladino, the series creator] and all the cast. I think it’s a conversation. It’s harder and harder to make a movie anymore, but I think there has been discussion about it.”

“It’s something that I’m proud of, in terms of what it has meant to girls who are now grown up and have had a bonding experience over the show,” Graham adds. “I’m so into the thing that I’m doing in when I’m in it that I don’t think about what then happens. Only now do I get all those DVDs and all those reruns, and for me it was ‘Laverne & Shirley’. It might be a show that has a little resonance beyond the time that it was actually on. I just love those people. To be on another show, I’m having another really different, but very positive experience, and in this day and age, it’s like a blessing.”

The other show is, of course, “Parenthood,” where viewers – and Graham – were recently introduced to her character’s ex, in the form of well-traveled TV dreamboat John Corbett (“Sex and the City,” “United States of Tara”).

“I wondered who was going to play him, my ex-husband and the father of my children, who we’ve talked about as a drug addict, as a charming guy, as a musician,” says Graham, “and John Corbett is awesome. And even better, I was already a fan and he’s such a talented actor and so perfect for this part. I’m so honored that he would do the show and it’s just been a really cool conflict to stir everything up.”

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She plays a struggling single mom on the hit show Parenthood. But in real life Lauren Graham knows just where she’s headed.

Lauren’s Road to Fame

When Lauren Graham first headed west to try her luck in Hollywood, she crashed on an aunt’s couch in a Los Angeles suburb. Often, she recalls, “I would have an audition at one o’clock and another at five. There wasn’t enough time to drive home in between, so I’d sit in the food court at the Beverly Center mall doing crossword puzzles. I still can’t smell Auntie Anne’s pretzels without having a flashback,” she adds with a laugh.

Nearly two decades later Graham, 44, is nestled in an armchair in the lounge of a Beverly Hills hotel. She is casually elegant, dressed in a gauzy gray sweater, skinny gray jeans, and ballet flats, her long dark hair gathered into a loose bun. These days she does her crosswords on the set of the hit NBC series Parenthood, where she stars as struggling single mother Sarah Braverman — a more serious version of the role she played on Gilmore Girls, the show that first lifted her to fame. More and more she tries her best to avoid the paparazzi, which is why she chose this secluded venue for our talk. The pretzel stand may be only a couple miles away, but it’s in another universe.

Still, Graham’s career path has taken her to a place that’s strangely close to her own childhood. In real life, TV’s best-loved solo mom was raised mostly by a single dad. Graham’s father, Lawrence, worked as a congressional staffer in Washington, D.C., commuting from the Virginia suburbs where Graham grew up. Her mother, Donna, was restless and artistic. She tried painting and acting, but her true calling was music. When Graham was 5, Donna left her daughter to seek her fortune as an artist. Her parents eventually divorced, and Lawrence cared for their little girl on his own.

Even with the help of babysitters, Graham’s father couldn’t quite cover all the bases. Her curly hair was a challenge: “My teacher called him from school and said, ‘You know, you can’t just brush the top layer; you’ve got to brush underneath it,’” recalls Graham. “I had this giant knot!” Fashion baffled him as well. For years he dressed her in a uniform of Levi’s and Adidas. Dinner was often late, the house seldom spotless. Mostly, though, he handled parenting with enthusiasm.

“My dad has an ease about him,” Graham says. “He isn’t super-demonstrative but he’s very warm and has a great sense of humor. Thanks to him, my childhood seemed pretty normal.” If Lawrence resented his wife’s leaving, he didn’t show it. Instead, he told Graham he admired her mother for pursuing her passion. He made sure his daughter got plenty of time with grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles so she’d feel like part of a family. As an avid reader, he passed on to her his passion for literature. “He’d say, ‘There’s nothing you want to know that you can’t learn from a book,’” she says. He took her to the theater and to Woody Allen movies, even hauled her along on business trips. And when she was 11 he took her to visit her mother, who had moved to London, for the first time.

The two quickly forged a relationship. Donna’s musical aspirations had not panned out, so she had reinvented herself as a fashion buyer. “She was incredibly beautiful and really smart, and she’d made all these independent choices,” says Graham, who returned to London regularly to visit her mom. “All her friends were artists and musicians: exotic, bohemian, cool. She gave me a sense that there was a world beyond my town. Her impulse was to follow her dream, and that was an inspiration to me.

“I’m sure I went through hard times about her leaving,” she says, “but philosophically speaking, I don’t have things I carry around and feel crummy about. I just don’t believe in that.”

Graham soon discovered she had her mother’s love of performing. “In school I played a Greek goddess who had the line, ‘It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.’ You know, like in that margarine commercial? And it got a huge laugh. I remember thinking, This is what I want to do all day. I felt a confidence onstage that I didn’t in life sometimes.”

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