Liza Rebecca Weil (born June 5, 1977) is an American actress. She is known for her role as Paris Geller in the television drama Gilmore Girls and has guest-starred on The Adventures of Pete & Pete, ER, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and The West Wing.
Weil was born in New Jersey to a family of actors. Her parents, Lisa and Marc Weil, toured Europe with their own comedy troupe, The Madhouse Company of London with her in tow. Weil had aspirations of becoming an archaeologist in her younger years, because of the Indiana Jones film trilogy and a childhood crush on Harrison Ford. In 1984, at the age of seven, her family settled down in suburban Lansdale, Pennsylvania, a community north-northwest of Philadelphia. In contrast to her Gilmore Girls character, Weil was a self-avowed average student in high school who focused more on her budding acting career than her studies; in her senior year she had to make up an English class during summer school because of a failing grade. Weil traveled frequently to New York for professional auditions, and acted in productions both off-Broadway and in Philadelphia's theatrical community before pursuing her film and television career. She is a 1995 graduate of the borough's North Penn High School.
Weil continues to be active in the Los Angeles theatrical community during hiatuses, is a regular performer at the Ojai Playwrights Conference in early August, and still occasionally performs in live theater in Philadelphia and New York. She has acted with every member of her family; in 2004, she headlined with her father in a well-received community theater production of Proof at the Montgomery Theater in Souderton, Pennsylvania, just north of her adopted hometown of Lansdale. Her first ever television role in 1994, which was an episode of The Adventures of Pete & Pete called "Yellow Fever", found her playing a bully alongside her mother Lisa, who played a teacher. Finally her younger sister Samantha shared the screen with Liza in Gilmore Girls's third season finale, "Those Are Strings, Pinocchio". Samantha Weil played a student named Bernadette (who was unrelated to Paris) making out a video yearbook entry in front of an impatient Paris, standing off to the side waiting to make her own.
An alumna of Columbia University, Weil received her first major feature film role co-starring with Kevin Bacon in Stir of Echoes. Before that role, she was the star of the 1998 independent film Whatever, and her first film in 1996 was the short A Cure For Serpents, where she played the daughter of a mysophobic woman bringing to her home a boyfriend who wasn't as obsessive with cleanliness, and how the mother deals with the challenge. She has also done several other short and feature-length independent films, which include Motel Jerusalem, Scar, and Lullaby, and shown interest in behind-the-camera work.
Weil was originally considered for the role of Rory Gilmore by Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino before Alexis Bledel won the role; the character of Paris Geller was created especially for Weil.
In 2006, Weil did a horror short called Grace, which was set around a miscarriage gone bad by her character, and featured Brian Austin Green as her love interest. The short film premiered at the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors convention on June 2, 2006, and has since been reworked as a feature film to be shot with a different cast. She also had a minor role in the Molly Shannon film Year of the Dog, and will appear as Doris Delay in the 2008 biographical film Neal Cassady, and in a voice acting role in Mars.
Weil also voiced a public service announcement which aired from June-October 2007 and aired on radio stations in Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley in support of the American Diabetes Association's Step Up to Fight Diabetes staircase climb event, which took place in Center City Philadelphia on October 20, 2007.
As of 2006, Weil resided in Santa Monica and is a film and movie buff. She married Paul Adelstein, who played Paul Kellerman on the Fox series Prison Break, and who now plays Dr. Cooper Freedman on ABC's Private Practice, a spin-off series from Grey's Anatomy, in a Jewish ceremony in November 2006; They had previously known each other through theatrical projects. The two have since acted together in three film projects, the 2007 short Order Up, the 2008 Gregory Dark-helmed Little Fish, Strange Pond, and The Missing Person. She also appeared in the 2004 short Affair Game, which was produced by Gilmore Girls castmate John Cabrera.
In 2006, she also became an aunt, when her sister Samantha had a child after she moved to the Los Angeles area.
Weil's real-life friend, actress Emily Bergl, appeared on Gilmore Girls several times as Paris's antagonist in student government and a leader of a school sorority, Francine Jarvis.
Weil is left-handed, and a natural brunette, having that hair color through at least 2000; it is believed she was told to dye it dark-blonde for her Gilmore Girls role to contrast with Bledel/Rory's brown hair. After the series, she went back to her original brown hair color. Amy Sherman-Palladino has complimented Weil's skin as "the best she's ever seen in her life."
