11 Juicy Things About ‘Gossip Girl’ The Cast Revealed In A ‘10 Years’ Profile

It has been an unthinkable TEN YEARS since Gossip Girl first launched the Serena vs Blair drama onto our screens and into our hearts. Where do the decades go. How did this happen. Why in the ever-loving fuck did they ever decide [SPOILERS] to make Dan Gossip Girl?

Some mysteries will never be answered.

Luckily, a LOT of other mysteries have been, slash stuff you never knew you needed to know. To mark ten years, a bunch of the cast and crew have sa href=”https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/08/gossip-girl-ten-year-anniversary?mbid=social_cp_facebook_vog”>spoken to Vanity Fair about their experiences making the show, and it’s a wild trip down memory lane.

Here’s the 11 best things we learnt.

1. The showrunners, who also made ‘The OC’, realised their fuckups.

Josh Schwartz said he and co-creator Stephanie Savage had learned from The OC‘s “crazy four-year run” when going into Gossip Girl. Um, yeah dude. You killed your main character in the third season.

2. Fans of the Gossip Girl books basically cast Serena for them.

The Gossip Girl books, by Cecily von Ziegesar, already had a dedicated online fan base who had been casting an imaginary series for years. They’d decided that Blake Lively, already an established actor through the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, was a perfect Serena.

3. But she’d been planning on quitting acting and going to college.

The producers had to convince her to join by saying she could attend Columbia University once a week. They said to her: “Your life will go back to normal [after the first year of the show] and you can start going to school. We can’t put it in writing, but we promise you can go.”

That obviously never ended up happening, which Blake laughs at now. She said: “This is advice to anyone: when they say, ‘We promise, but we can’t put it in writing,’ there’s a reason they can’t put it in writing.  But no, the show didn’t slow down. It just got more and more.”

4. Leighton Meester dyed her hair brunette in order to get the role of Blair.

Says Swchartz: “[Leighton] came in and she was really funny, and really smart and played vulnerable. But there was one problem: she was blonde. And Blake was blonde, obviously; Serena had to be blonde. So, she went to the sink and dyed her hair. She wanted it.”


Blair Waldorf (L); Paul Archuleta / Getty (R).

5. Chase Crawford, who plays pretty rich dumb boy Nate, says he didn’t buy Leighton as Blair until she put the headband on.

Chase says he remembers meeting Leighton at their audition and thinking, “I just don’t see her as Blair Waldorf. I can’t see it.” Then she popped on a headband and turned around “slyly in her chair”, and he says he can remember thinking: “That girl can act. She’s the perfect girl for this.” 

Obviously.

6. The showrunners were so keen on casting Ed Westwick as Chuck Bass that they refused to cast a backup.

Ed, a British national, was in the US on a working visa. The network asked Schwartz and Savage to cast a backup in case his visa didn’t work out, but they refused. Extremely good decision by everyone, really. Can you imagine ANYONE else being Chuck Bass?

The correct answer is “no”.

7. Blake and Leighton weren’t friends on set.

Executive producer Joshua Safran said that Blake and Leighton, like their characters, were completely different people, and although they were friendly, they never matched Blair and Serena’s level of friendship. (You know, when the two were actually friends.)

“Blake is very much in the moment. Blake knows what’s happening. She knows this movie’s coming out, this band is happening. You talk to Blake on a very contemporary level, and she would be like, ‘I’m doing this thing tonight. Have you been to this restaurant?’ Leighton was very removed and very quiet, and, after her scenes were done, she would wander the stage. I had this image of her just in these gorgeous dresses with a book in her hand, sort of a little bit out of focus out in the corners.”

“Blake and Leighton were not friends. They were friendly, but they were not friends like Serena and Blair. Yet the second they’d be on set together, it’s as if they were.”

8. Blake and Penn Badgley, a.k.a. Dan, a.k.a. Lonely Boy, kept their breakup hidden on set.

The pair dated for the first few seasons of the show, mirroring their characters’ Serena and Dan. But when they broke up, they kept that shit on lockdown.

Says Safran:

“The shocking thing was, I found out on the set of the Season 2 finale that Blake and Penn had broken up months before. They kept the breakup hidden from the crew, which you could never do now. I don’t even know how they did it. They kept it from everybody which is a testament to how good they are as actors. Because they did not want their personal drama to relate to the show.”

9. Penn and Dan were basically the same person.

Dan was the outsider of the gang, living in Brooklyn and epitomising the whiny white boy writer character that would sink like dead weight in a show in 2017. And according to Safran, Penn was also a bit of an outsider on set.

“Penn didn’t like being on Gossip Girl, but . . . he was Dan,” he said. “He may not have liked it, but [his character] was the closest to who he was.”

Penn refused to be interviewed for the piece, making him the only one of the main cast to do so. Dude must have really hated the show.

10. Ed Westwick still doesn’t know who Gossip Girl is.

In the final episode, Dan was controversially revealed to be Gossip Girl the entire time. But uh, it turns out that Ed was too busy being handsome and British to notice. When Vanity Fair asked him to comment, he replied via email: “I still am not sure who GG was lol.”

11. Blake is down for a Gossip Girl reunion, and Leighton wouldn’t rule it out.

Blake has absolutely had the most stella career since Gossip Girl. Ed and Penn have been in a few good but under-the-radar films, Leighton released a few pop tracks and had a baby with Seth Cohen, and Chase… well, IMDb tells me he’s done a few things since Gossip Girl ended, none of which ring a single damn bell.

“I’m open to anything that’s good, that’s interesting, and that sort of feels necessary,” said Blake. “I imagine we all would [consider it]. I can’t speak for everyone else, but we all owe so much to this show, and I think that it would be silly not to acknowledge that.”

And Von Ziegesar would love for it to follow the story line of her horror adaptation, ‘Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer‘, where “Serena comes back from boarding school to kill everyone.”

MAKE. IT. HAPPEN.


*OMW to murder u all*

More Stuff From PEDESTRIAN.TV