Milo Ventimiglia On The Horrors Of Online Dating, ‘Gilmore Girls,’ And New Series
Milo Ventimiglia and “Relationship Status” castmembers at Tribeca. (Diane Bondareff/AP Images for go90)
Milo Ventimiglia’s had a busy year. Not only will he be reprising his role as nihilistic heartthrob Jess Mariano on Netflix’s much-anticipated Gilmore Girls reboot, but he’s been working with James Frey (yep, the A Million Little Pieces dude) on Relationship Status, a new show streaming on Verizon’s free go90 app. The twelve-episode series, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, follows a few dozen 20-and-30-somethings in New York and Los Angeles as they try to navigate dating in a world full of apps and social media. We sat down with Ventimiglia, who produces and stars in the series, to talk a little about dating and television-watching in the digital age, as well as to dish on Jess’s return.
So you are in, and I believe you’re also producing, Relationship Status? Yeah, I’ve actually been a producer longer than I’ve been an actor on it. My partner Russ Cundiff and I were lucky enough to get a chance to work on it with Full Fathom Five, which is James Frey’s company, and Todd Cohen and Laura Terry over there. We’ve been on it with development for almost two years before he found a praetorship with StyleHaul, and they helped us get to the finish line and cross the finish line, and get it out in a way that, hopefully, a lot of audience is going to be aware of it and streaming it on Go90.
And how did you get involved? I had the script slipped to me, and my partner and I read it and we just loved it. We thought it was very relevant to the current trend of a million different dating apps today. Bumble and Riot and Happn, Tinder, and Grindr, and all these ways that people are meeting up nowadays and trying to find love, and even friendship, or even just something physical. It was a great story in the center of all that. And we thought it was relevant to a broader audience, so we jumped onboard and then we found a set of partners in StyleHaul. Once that happened, we moved pretty quick into production, wrangled up 30 actors in about 20 days, and shot a show.