Liza Rebecca Weil (born June 5, 1977) is an American actress. She is best known for her starring role as Paris Geller in the WB/CW comedy-drama series Gilmore Girls (2000–2007) and its Netflix revival series Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (2016). She is also known for her roles as White House aide Amanda Tanner in the ABC political drama series Scandal (2012) and as attorney Bonnie Winterbottom in the ABC legal drama series How to Get Away with Murder (2014–2020). Early life and training Weil was born in Passaic, New Jersey, into an acting family. She was raised in, and continues to practice, Reform Judaism. Her parents, Lisa and Marc Weil, toured Europe with their 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 northwest of Philadelphia, where her parents still reside. Weil has described herself as an average student who focused more on her budding acting career than her studies. Weil traveled frequently to New York City for professional auditions and acted in productions both off-Broadway and in Philadelphia's theatrical community before pursuing her film and television career. A 1995 graduate of North Penn High School, she graduated in the summer rather than the regular term due to her acting commitments. Her first appearance on network television was in a 1995 episode of the New York-based CBS soap opera As the World Turns, where she played an unnamed student in a science class. Career 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 radio dramas with L.A. Theatre Works, and still occasionally performs in live theater in Philadelphia and New York City. 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 (she would also