Lauren Graham plays another hysterical, feisty mom in new 'Mighty Ducks' Disney+ series
Gilmore Girls and Parenthood star Lauren Graham will continue to play the mom you wish you had - or maybe have in addition to your own mother - in the new Disney+ series The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, which premieres on March 26.
"It's a tricky thing to have played such great characters," Graham told Yahoo Canada. "As an actor, I want to be choosing different roles, the business is such that you tend to get offered the same kind of thing."
"My hope is that I can be part of projects and characters who honour...what else you've seen. My taste is for things that are happy and hopeful and comic, and that put something good and happy and positive into the world. Those are hard to find, you would be surprised. It's like TV has gone darker, and more edgy and more sci-fi."
Graham plays Alex Morrow on The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers whose son Evan (Brady Noon) gets kicked off the Mighty Ducks, now a very competitive and powerhouse hockey team. Alex convinces her son to start a new team, putting together a mix of kids with various degrees of hockey knowledge and experience on the ice.
But Graham is not just an actor in this series, she is also a co-executive producer, while her co-star and original Mighty Ducks cast member, Emilio Estevez, takes on an executive producer role as well.
"It's become just as important to me to be part of the creative conversation of the overall project, and not just my little or big part as an actor, " Graham explained. "The more experience I've had, the more I look at it as a project and as a whole, and I want to have a voice in its direction."
"But in terms of day-to-day life, maybe it just results in people listening to you more, I don't know,...but it was certainly a welcome addition, and something that was important to me."
Estevez returns as Gordon Bombay but he is no longer a supporter of the Ducks, in fact, he hates hockey entirely when we first see him in the series.
If you didn't get enough skating from Graham in Gilmore Girls, when Luke (Scott Patterson) makes Lorelai (Graham) an ice rink in front of her house, you will get to see more skating-related acting from Graham in the series. She joked to Yahoo Canada that she was excited to become a "world class skater," but unfortunately it just didn't happen.
Graham is also known for showing off her special skills in in Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist, singing and dancing in the series. She was supposed to film more episodes of the show this year but COVID-19 impacted scheduling.
"My agent asked the same thing, he's like 'are we just choosing things on special skills now?'" Graham said. "Sometimes you are just looking for a challenge and that challenge can be a character, an accent, a world, a skill."
While Graham is a new member to the Mighty Ducks world, she recognizes the unique challenge that comes with working on a project that so many people grew up with and still love to this day, not entirely dissimilar to the Gilmore Girls reboot on Netflix, Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life.
"When you're rebooting something chances are you're back because people care and you have a responsibility to those people that's different from starting a new show," she said. "It was important to me that the scripts stood on their own.
"This should work for you whether you love those movies, or whether you've never seen them, and of course, I had confidence because I knew Emilio would not sign on to do something that he didn't believe respected the origin... I think it respects the movies and then takes us into present day."
