Since Gossip Girl celebrated its 10-year anniversary yesterday, the Internet has been flooded with a constant stream of little-known tidbits about the show. But instead of dwelling on the past, why not look into a more diverse future?
Issa Rae, the creator and star of HBO's breakout comedy Insecure, is doing just that. She'd like nothing more than to see a Gossip Girl-type show aimed at a young black audience, pitching her idea to The New Yorker in a new video in connection with the magazine's Television Issue. Unsurprisingly, the idea she has in mind is nothing short of fantastic.
"I would like to pitch you a new show about black teenagers. Think 90201 or Gossip Girl for black kids," she explained in her video. "Maybe we call it Ladera Heights 90041.... It could be Potomac, Maryland 20854. That's the real s---." She even has a few characters in mind — and boring archetypes need not apply. "My main character would be Lil' Richie. He's, you know, a young black rich teen. He's tired of the access, and the excess," Issa continued. "I'm Lil' Richie, I'm so tired of being rich, there's more to me than this. I just created a song. That's the theme song. I would definitely have a ho character who's always on her ho s---. Just thirsty. No goodie-goodies over here. Not in this show. Nobody was watching 90210 for Tori Spelling."
But most importantly, Issa says the sheer lack of teen and young-adult programming aimed at a black audience is what's encouraging her to pursue her pitch. "I don't think since, I would say, Moesha have we followed the lives of black teens," she concluded. "So, like, where's our Gossip Girl? This Gossip Girl is black, b----.... That's the tagline!"
So began all 121 episodes of “Gossip Girl” — with a mischievous greeting from anonymous blogger Gossip Girl herself.
For most viewers, it was a tantalizing invitation: Their rare chance to join the exclusive group of Manhattan residents who live north of 59th Street. Well, for 42 minutes at least.
But for teens who actually lived there — like myself — the reality was a little bit different.
The CW drama, which premiered 10 years ago this fall, was an immediate pop culture phenomenon. The six-season show centered around a gaggle of attractive teenagers at an Upper East Side private school.
Ed Westwick and Chace Crawford in “Gossip Girl,” season five.
That high-class setting was as much a main character as Chuck or Blair. The show’s teens inhabited a world of summers abroad and jewel-embellished school uniforms.
Their nights were filled with raging house parties and elegant galas. They seemed to never have one iota of homework.
Technically, as someone who grew up on the Upper East Side and attended a private all-girls school there, I’m part of that crowd. None of this was unfathomable or exotic to me, except for the no-homework thing.
Locations like Central Park made the on-screen lifestyles of Blair Waldorf and other characters accessible. Well, almost.
But I was just as obsessed with the show as any poor sod streaming from Iowa (or, heck, even China) — we all were.
Even if you didn’t love it, you watched it. You had to, because when you got to school the next day, everyone would be talking about whatever backstabbing jerk Georgina did the night before.
It’s a fascinating thing, to see yourself and your life acted out. There were the same Met museum steps, Scoop bags and Dean & DeLuca coffee cups — but, suddenly, they seemed more beautiful and exciting. There were our plaid school skirts … somehow, theirs were actually cute.
The plotlines were like our lives, but on steroids. Oh, someone I knew kissed the son of a nightclub mogul? Well, Blair married an actual prince. And yes, our real lives had nuggets of the show’s intense drama —car crashes, substance abuse, mental health scares, affairs — but, like any good fantasy, the per-episode frequency was exaggerated. We saw one scandal a semester, tops.
Oh, someone I knew kissed the son of a nightclub mogul? Well, Blair married an actual prince.
As for the characters: They were relatable — sort of. Of course, we weren’t all Blairs or Serenas, queens of the cool-girl clique. Nor were we all dork-turned-fashion goth Jenny, or activist-artist Vanessa, or glasses-wearing nerd Nelly Yuki. But there were ripples among my peers as they internalized bits and pieces of the overachiever, the it-girl, the pariah, the fake ID flasher, the deeply hurt little rich boy. I imagine non-New York viewers felt the same: After all, teen angst is a universal language.
“Gossip Girl” wasn’t as aspirational for us as for a layperson, but it was still aspirational. In fact, I’d guess that it was even more compelling because some of the backdrops (hello, Palace hotel) and locations (yup, Cipriani) were in our orbit. Their lives — full of glitz, glamour and drama — were almost attainable. Almost.
So we watched. We couldn’t help it. Part distorting mirror, part guilty pleasure. It’s almost reassuring to hear that a new generation of fans is streaming the show on Netflix — another cohort sucked up by themes that manage to be simultaneously trashy and elite. Gossip Girl, whose catchphrase “you know you love me” applies as much to the series as to her, knew what she was doing all along.
An independent ticket for 2020? Why it's more than political gossip. Christian Science Monitor Still, chatter about the Kasich-Hickenlooper trial balloon – born of common-ground efforts on policy and joint public appearances – amounts to more than just political gossip. It speaks to widespread disaffection among Americans with the two major ...
In celebration of Gossip Girl‘s 10th birthday, Vanity Fair chatted with the entire cast to reminisce about their characters and the history of the show. And we just learned that Leighton Meester’s hair almost stopped her from playing Blair Waldorf — which, TBH, would have been a tragic situation for the show, for Meester, and for us.
Meester originally auditioned to play Serena van der Woodsen, the role Blake Lively ended up playing (duh). After she read for the role, she realized she felt a much stronger connection to Blair. So, in an effort to convince the producers that she was the only person who could play Blair, she dyed her hair. But like, not at a salon or in the privacy of her own home — she dyed her hair in the sink with the producers right there.
“She came in and she was really funny, and really smart and played vulnerable,” Gossip Girl co-creator, Josh Schwartz, told Vanity Fair. “But there was one problem: she was blonde. And Blake was blonde, obviously; Serena had to be blonde. So, [Leighton] went to the sink and dyed her hair. She wanted it.”
Chace Crawford (aka Nate Archibald) told Vanity Fair that he remembers meeting Meester at his audition and, at first, thought, “I just don’t see her as Blair Waldorf. I can’t see it.” But then he watched as she turned around “slyly in her chair,” with Blair’s soon-to-be-trademark headband on, and she launched into character.
“I just remember thinking, ‘That girl can act. She’s the perfect girl for this.’”
When Claire Willett made her (impressively well thought-out) Twitter thread about why Rachel and Joey should have been endgame on Friends, her argument was undercut by the fact that many of her pro-Joey arguments were really just digs at Ross. Ross was objectively terrible, but does that mean Rachel should be with Joey? I'm pointing this out because Blair and Dan should be together because they have a deep connection, not just because Chuck (Ed Westwick) is horrible — but it's worth noting, that, yes, Chuck is horrible.
Issa Rae is busy with her own show Insecure but she has other ideas too. Speaking to the New Yorker about a fantasy TV show she'd like to see get made, Rae said she wants to see something like 90210 or Gossip Girl starring black kids.
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Lil' Richie is the main character in Rae's dream show. He's a rich teen who's tired of his upmarket lifestyle and wants to see what exists outside of the "access and excess." Another character, who hasn't got a name. is thirsty and "always on her ho shit." The only rule for characters in the prospective show is no "goodie-goodies."
Rae's show remains in her mind for now. However, last time Twitter got hold of an idea it ended up with Netflix reportedly commissioning a scammer movie starring Rihanna and Lupita Nyong’o. Check out Rae's full pitch above, now.
Hello, Upper East Siders . . . and everyone else, I suppose. Hillary Busis here, still filling in for Rebecca Keegan. It’s Wednesday, and I’m wondering where I stashed all my kicky headbands and plaid skirts. (Do you remember, Dorota?)
Greetings from New York, where—as if it weren’t clear by now—we’re feting the 10th anniversary of a seminal teen drama, flinching at the biggest casualty of the Game of Thrones finale (that would be MTV’s Video Music Awards), and shaking our heads at the continued odiousness of Bachelor in Paradise.
XOXO
Gossip Girl did not change the world—but for 121 witty, backstabbing, beautifully dressed episodes, it made the world a hell of a lot more fun to live in. A decade after the CW series’s splashy debut, Vanity Fair’s own Josh Duboff gathered almost every major player from the cast and creative team for a juicy longread about the show’s life and legacy. Come for Blake Lively and Leighton Meester’s charmingly blasé memories of the show’s humble beginnings; stay for a juicy tidbit about Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s cameo. (“They did it for the money,” co-creator Josh Schwartz says, with a laugh.)
From The CW/Everett Collection.
A NEW KINGPIN
You may know Arturo Castro as Jaime, Ilana’s lovable, drug-dealing roommate on Broad City. But if you tune into the next season of Narcos—which hits Netflix this Friday, September 1—you’ll see an entirely new side of the actor: there, he’s playing the entitled son of a Colombian drug lord, someone who uses his inherited power and privileged position to reign as an obnoxious, inept, totally unqualified leader. Sound familiar? Castro agrees; as he told V.F. contributor Valentina Valentini, his Narcos character does sound an awful lot like . . . Game of Thrones alum King Joffrey. “He’s kind of a psychopath,” Castro says, adding that the Joffrey comparison “is very flattering, because I loved that character. I mean I don’t love who he is—he’s a very hateable person. But it’s such a joy to play somebody sadistic, to be honest. That might come off wrong, but it’s like you get the best, most fucked-up lines. They’re so fun to say and perform.”
NO SOGGY BOTTOMS
The Great British Bake Off is dead; long live The Great British Bake Off! The latest season of the U.K.’s favorite low-stakes reality competition premiered across the pond Tuesday, to great consternation; this is, after all, the first season since the show moved networks, which precipitated a great cast exodus that left celebrity chef Paul Hollywood as Bake Off’s only remaining original cast member. Thankfully for fans, the show’s banter and appealingly browned crusts seem to have survived the transition; Lucy Mangan of The Guardian crows that the series is still “showcasing the best of humanity” in her review, while Michael Hogan of The Telegraph offered similar praise: “Despite losing three-quarters of its stars when it ‘followed the dough’ away from the BBC, Bake Off still tastes as sweet.” What’s more, the revamped series drew solid ratings—a live-plus-one audience of 6.5 million, giving Channel 4 its highest overnight numbers since 2012.
DON’T WANT MY MTV
V.F.’s Yohana Desta e-mails:
Are the MTV Video Music Awards losing their pop-cultural sway? Based on the ratings for the most recent show, it appears likely. The glittering music spectacle only pulled in 5.68 million viewers across 10 platforms this year, despite promises of watercooler moments like the debut of a new Taylor Swift music video and some anti-Donald Trump chatter. But the political jokes never went particularly far, and Swift’s video appeared on YouTube moments after its live debut—so it turns out those enticements just weren’t enough. Oh, and did I mention that the show also went up against the Game of Thrones finale? Because it did—and boy, did it flop by comparison. The fantasy HBO series is still the biggest show on television, notching 12.1 million viewers with its finale—and proving it can’t be stopped by something as ephemeral as an awards show. Sorry, Katy Perry—and better luck to next year’s host, who likely won’t be up against such a massive juggernaut.
SIZING UP DOWNSIZING
V.F.’s Katey Rich writes:
Alexander Payne’s new film, Downsizing, screened for press at the Venice Film Festival Wednesday morning—where critics raved, and V.F.’s contributor Guy Lodge wrote that, in its best parts, “Downsizing seems to play to the director’s best, most acidly rueful instincts. The film will next make its way to Toronto, but with its theatrical release way in the distance (it’s scheduled for December), Paramount has released a brief new teaser—actually, the dreaded teaser-for-a-trailer—to spark curiosity about the movie. What can we learn from 30 seconds of minimal dialogue that’s largely devoted to introducing the starry cast (Matt Damon, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Jason Sudeikis, and Kristen Wiig)? Well, they shelled out for a Talking Heads song . . . and that’s about it. The full trailer arrives September 12, but more festival reviews in the meantime should tell us a lot more.
EVEN MORE TROUBLE IN PARADISE
V.F.’s Laura Bradley writes:
On Tuesday night, Bachelor in Paradise finally—we think—finished examining the scandal that halted production on the reality series earlier this summer. DeMario Jackson appeared last week to discuss what it was like to be caught in the middle of the scandal, which followed an incident of alleged misconduct—and this week, Corinne Olympios stopped by to deliver her side of the story. Throughout the month, as the series has milked the scandal for all the drama it’s worth, it’s become increasingly clear that Bachelor in Paradise itself has no plans to acknowledge its own culpability in the mess. Throughout the month, the show has drafted the media as a scapegoat—but in reality it’s the show’s very concept (drunk people hooking up) that leaves its contestants at risk. And even with a new two-drink-per-hour maximum in place, it’s hard to imagine that something like what happened to Olympios and Jackson won’t eventually happen again.
That’s the news for this sunny day in New York. What are you seeing out there? Send tips, comments, and beautifully baked Cypriot flaounes to Hillary_Busis@condenast.com, and feel free to follow me on Twitter @hillibusterr.
In honor of the major anniversary, Vanity Fair caught up with the cast and crew—including creators Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz as well as writer Joshua Safran—who revealed some surprising facts not even the show's biggest fans may have known about.
1. It Was Inspired After The O.C.'s Success: Schwartz and Savage were also the creators and showrunners of The O.C. They were looking for something just as exciting to execute after the show's end, and Gossip Girl was just the way to do it.
"We learned a lot of lessons [on The O.C.] and its kind of crazy four-year run that we wanted to take and apply to something moving forward," Schwartz said. "And we were really excited about doing something in New York."
The CW
2. Blake Lively Was Pegged for Serena Van der Woodsen From the Start: Thanks to the books' fan groups and message boards as well as Lively's popularity in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, the creators already had an idea Lively was the girl for the role.
"We didn't see a lot of other girls for Serena," Schwartz said. "She has to be somebody that you believe would be sitting in the front row at Fashion Week eventually."
3. But Lively Wasn't So Sure: She wanted to get her degree. "I said, 'No, I want to go to college. Thank you, though,'" Lively recalled. "Then they said, 'OK, you can go to Columbia [University] one day a week. After the first year [of the show], it'll quiet down. Your life will go back to normal and you can start going to school. We can't put it in writing, but we promise you can go.' So that's why I said, 'OK. You know what? I'll do this.'"
She never ended up finishing college.
4. Leighton Meester Was Underwhelmed By the Audition Process: "I think it was just the normal, typical pilot season audition for me," she recalled. "I auditioned, and then I tested once, and then we did a screen test with everybody. And then, that was it...I dunno. I got it."
But her recollection doesn't entirely match her actions at the time.
"She came in and she was really funny, and really smart and played vulnerable," Schwartz clarified. "But there was one problem: She was blonde. And Blake was blonde, obviously; Serena had to be blonde. So, [Leighton, who played Blair Waldorf] went to the sink and dyed her hair. She wanted it."
5. The Two Girls Couldn't Have Been Any More Different: "Blake is very much in the moment. Blake knows what's happening. She knows this movie's coming out, this band is happening," Safran recalled. "Leighton [on the other hand] 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."
6. And They Weren't BFFs: "Blake and Leighton were not friends," Safran continued. "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."
7. Ed Westwick and Chace Crawford Were BFFs: The two—who played Chuck Bass and Nate Crawford—actually lived together in an apartment in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood when the show started filming. They first bonded at an Arctic Monkeys concert.
"We had these girls coming up to us, and they were kind of freaking out about it: 'Oh, we love the books.' [Ed and I] kept looking at each other like, shit, man," Crawford recalled.
Giovanni Rufino / The CW
8. Westwick's Style Was Inspired by Jersey Shore: But not how you'd think. Rather, the reason Westwick was so put together and fashionable was to bring the opposite of Jersey Shore to TV.
"I think because he was a Brit and had a different understanding of clothing and what it means, he was game day one," Gossip Girl costume designer Eric Daman explained. "He had a very big influence on menswear and how men dress today, and on what getting dressed up means. Menswear, at that point, was still very Jersey Shore...I'm very proud we got to break through to the men and be like, 'No, it's OK to dress up. You're not gonna look like some big pansy because you're in a fucking suit, dude. Suck it up, put on the bow tie.'"
9. And Penn Badgley Was Very Much Dan: Despite often his obvious dislike for the show, Badgley (who played Dan Humphrey) was very much like his character both on- and off-camera.
"Penn didn't like being on Gossip Girl, but...he was Dan," Safran said. "He may not have liked it, but [his character] was the closest to who he was."
The CW
10. Badgley and Lively Kept Their Split a Secret for Two Months: The on-screen couple dated in real life for three years while filming the show. However, when they split in 2010, they didn't want it to interfere with the show or their careers.
"The shocking thing was, I found out on the set of the season two finale that Blake and Penn had broken up months before," Safran recalled. "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."
11. And Leonardo DiCaprio Eventually Had an Impact: When Lively started dating DiCaprio in 2011 (before she ended up withRyan Reynolds), it inspired the Gossip Girl writers. In fact, they even moved the show's filming to L.A. for a little while.
"We learned a lot from Blake," Safran said. "When I think about shooting the L.A. episodes, Blake was dating [DiCaprio] at the time, and she had this thing where she had a doll that she took photos of that she sent to Leo. Blake was way ahead of the curve. It was pre-Instagram. She was documenting her life in photographs in a way that people were not yet doing."
12. It Felt More Like Marketing Than Acting: Lively admitted that her real life and the show often crossed boundaries, which only heightened its popularity. In fact, she said she never really felt like she was acting.
"It felt like we were in the center of a marketing machine, a cultural pop phenomenon," she admitted to Vanity Fair. "We were creating three episodes at once sometimes, we were given our lines at the very last minute, we didn't know where our characters were going; there was no planning or arc...It almost felt like a sketch show. We were basically sort of reading off of cue cards. There were people taking pictures the whole time and paparazzi jumping in front of the cameras—it felt like we were part of a cultural experiment...There was something neat about that."
13. The Show Actually Had Its Own Gossip Girl: Before hacking was even a major thing, someone was getting into Gossip Girl emails and stealing scripts to sell online.
"Our scripts were ending up online, and we couldn't figure out how," one of the show's producers recalled. "We hired a private investigator. We didn't understand what was happening, because everything was getting leaked, every detail...A teenager, I think either [from] Russia or Bulgaria, had hacked one of the writer's e-mails, and was selling scripts on eBay. But they were underage, so they couldn't be prosecuted. It was a f--king production nightmare. We would have to 'X' out every script. We would have to print on red paper...It was like there was a 'Gossip Girl' in our system."
14. Westwick Still Doesn't Know Who the Real Gossip Girl Is: Even though the season finale revealed who'd been signing "xoxo, gossip girl" all those years, Westwick didn't get the memo.
"I still am not sure who GG was lol," he admitted to VF.
15. A Reboot Isn't Off the Table: When asked about a potential spin-off series or reunion show, both the producers and the cast didn't completely deny it.
"Yeah, I don't really hear [talk of] that," Meester said. "I guess I hear that in fits and starts here and there, but it's hard to say. If everyone was into it and if the timing was right, you know? I don't want to say, 'No, never.'"
Lively, on the other hand, said she'd "of course" take a role on a reboot into consideration.
"I'm open to anything that's good, that's interesting, and that sort of feels necessary," she said. "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."
Gossip Girl—one of the most popular teen television series in recent memory—is turning 10 years old this September. On the occasion of the anniversary, Senior Writer Josh Duboffspoke to many of the cast, crew, and production team members—including Blake Lively and Leighton Meester—about what it was like to film the CW flagship series, amidst the media frenzy, and to contemplate the show’s legacy.
For a special bonus episode of Vanity Fair’s pop-culture podcast, In the Limelight, Duboff and co-host Julie Miller talked to two of the show’s stars—who both played fan-favorite characters on the series.
Zuzanna Szadkowski, who played Dorota (Blair’s loyal housekeeper), stopped by the studio to chat about working with Meester, share the questions fans have for her, explain how playing Dorota affected her dating life, and reveal the surprising fact about the ducks you see on the show (yes, the ducks).
Michelle Trachtenberg—who played, as Duboff puts it in his article, “impeccably dressed menace” Georgina Sparks—called in to talk about her time on the show (she said she still receives scores of Georgina-themed comments on any Instagram she posts, whether related to Gossip Girl or not). Trachtenberg also discussed Georgina’s incredible fashion—and what items from her wardrobe she was able to keep—as well as a highly entertaining tale about filming at the Met.
Check out In the Limelight on Twitter and Instagram—and subscribe on Apple Podcasts!
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Can you believe it has been ten years since we first laid eyes on Gossip Girl? The show is constantly up for reboot scrutiny since reboots and remakes are a thing now and because it was such an iconic show for millennials. However, whenever any member of the Gossip Girl cast is asked about a remake, the answer is always lukewarm. Maybe? Why? What would it even be about? However, we have one bit of info about a potential reboot or sequel if it ever were to happen.
According to the synopsis on Amazon, this story is essentially the Gossip Girl series but what if Serena van der Woodsen returned from boarding school and instead of living a glamorous life, she killed Nate Archibald. UHM WHAT?
Poppy
“Just as in the original story, Serena returns from boarding school hoping to make amends with her BFF Blair Waldorf — things just haven’t been the same since Nate Archibald came between them. But here’s where our dark tale takes a turn: Serena decides that the only way for her to make things right with Blair is to eliminate Nate. If that means killing him, well, c’est la vie. Her attempted murder doesn’t go unnoticed by Blair, however, who isn’t about to let Serena kill whoever she wants — not when there’s Cyrus Rose and Chuck Bass and Titi Coates and everyone else who’s ever irritated Blair to get rid of first.”
The original series was published in 2002, and this alt slasher version hit bookshelves in 2011.
The book’s author told Vanity Fair that she’d love to see the Psycho Killer version as the show’s next incarnation. Tbh, now that most teen shows center around a murder or a death (Riverdale, 13 Reasons Why, Pretty Little Liars), it kind of fits right into the marketplace.
Blake Lively: “Of course. I’m open to anything that’s good, that’s interesting, and that sort of feels necessary...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.”
Leighton Meester: "If everyone was into it and if the timing was right, you know?... I don’t want to say, ‘No, never...’”
Craig Noone, 29, has been told by Bluebirds manager Neil Warnock he is surplus to requirements. Since the winger is in the last year of his contract, Cardiff look set to offload the winger. Warnock has previously stated:
“I think Nooney realises it's time for him to move on, I think he needs a new challenge now. He's done ever so well for the club since he's been here. I only ever played two years at a club and I was a winger and I was ready to move on, and I think Craig needs a new challenge, get his enthusiasm back.”
After leaving Liverpool as a teenager, Craig Noone started his football career playing for non-league sides Skelmersdale United F.C, Burscough F.C and Southport, before signing for Championship side Plymouth Argyle in 2008. Noone spent three years with Plymouth, before moving on to join Brighton at the end of 2010.
In 2012, Noone signed for Cardiff for £1 million, playing an integral role as Cardiff were promoted to the Premier League in 2013. Noone also scored the goal against Bolton that secured the Championship title for Cardiff.
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With over 200 appearances at Championship level, Craig Noone is an experienced player who could do well for Wanderers.
Obviously, like any deal, Chris Taylor’s possible departure needs to happen first before anyone new is signed.
Do you think Craig Noone would be a good signing for Wanderers? Let us know in the comments box below.
Badgley has never been shy about his dislike for the show so it's no real surprise that he declined to be interviewed for the Vanity Fair piece. But Safran was quick to point out that whether Badgley likes it or not, he's actually a lot like his character. “Penn didn’t like being on Gossip Girl, but . . . he was Dan," Safran said. "He may not have liked it, but [his character] was the closest to who he was." The truth hurts.
Sleeping With Sirens performed a live session with KROQ last night, and they played the title track from their upcoming album Gossip live for the very first time!
You can watch the entire performance here, where they played "Gossip," a Sulbime cover and "Legends."
Check out Sleeping With Sirens' amazing acoustic performance below, just skip ahead to 10:30!
When asked about the song, Quinn says:
"That song, to me, is a really special one just because I feel like a lot of people can relate to dealing with cyberbullying and all that stuff on the internet—a lot of people have opinions and a lot of people have the oppurtunity to voice their opinions via online, so I wanted to write a song about just being who I am and being honest. I'm not a perfect person, but don't believe the lies that you hear about people—give people a chance to be human, and that's what that song's all about."
Alt Press caught up with Vocalist Kellin Quinn and guitarist Jack Fowler to talk more about the new album, describing it as both dark in both sound and lyrical content. But like all things, darkness has its natural opposite, and that’s an element that SWS never forget to include in their songwriting.
“I think [it’s about] being lost and then finding hope,” Quinn says. “It’s a dark record. It sounds dark, but there’s a hopefulness in everything. That’s always something I’ve tried to do as a vocalist. When I write about a sad topic, I always want there to be a light at the end of the tunnel.”
They explain that creating their fifth album has both lifted them up and grounded them, explaining that what fans will hear of them on this album is a more true representation of Sleeping With Sirens.
“I think we’re a completely different band as opposed to the last time you saw us,” Fowler revealed. “If you see us on this record [cycle], you’re gonna have the best night of your life and the best show [from] our band. It’s gonna make you dance, it’s gonna make you cry.”
The band released a new single last week, so check out "Cheers" if you haven't already!
Sleeping With Sirens are about to head out on an intimate headlining tour in support of Gossip. See the full list of cities and dates below!
Dates:
08/31 - San Francisco, CA @ Slim's 09/01 - Los Angeles, CA @ Troubadour 09/02 - San Diego, CA @ SOMA Sidestage 09/05 - Boulder, CO @ Fox Theatre 09/07 - St. Louis, MO @ Ready Room 09/08 - Chicago, [email protected] Bottom Lounge 09/09 - Detroit, MI @ The Shelter 09/10 - Cleveland, OH @ Agora Theatre 09/12 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Mr. Smalls Theatre 09/13 - Toronto, ON @ Opera House 09/15 - Worcester, MA @ Palladium (Upstairs) 09/16 - Syracuse, NY @ Lost Horizon 09/17 - Philadelphia, PA @ The Foundry at The Fillmore 09/18 - Baltimore, MD @ Ottobar 09/20 - New York, NY @ The Gramercy Theatre 09/22 - Washington, DC @ Rock & Roll Hotel 09/23 - Charlotte, NC @ The Underground 09/24 - Atlanta, GA @ Masquerade (Hell) 09/26 - Orlando, FL @ The Social 09/27 - Tampa, FL @ The Orpheum 09/28 - Pensacola, FL @ Vinyl Music Hall 09/30 - Louisville, KY @ Louder Than Life Festival 09/01 - Madison, WI @ WJJO Sonic Boom Festival
What do you think of Sleeping With Sirens' live rendition of "Gossip"? Sound off in the comments below!
Watch more: Watch Sleeping With Sirens debut “Legends” live with a children’s choir
Blake Lively had quit acting. The blonde Tarzana, California, native—who, one imagines, leaves a trail of sunflower emojis and the scent of cupcake icing in her wake wherever she goes—had had enough. Eighteen years old at the time, she had just appeared in a small independent film and come to a crushing conclusion: “I realized that [acting] was a business as much as a craft,” she told me more than a decade after the fact, while on the West Coast, where her husband, Ryan Reynolds, was about to start shooting Deadpool 2. “People will go see your movie based on your standing and all of that, and it didn’t make sense to me because I was 18 and being an artist.” She decided, having deferred from college a year earlier, that she would jump off the Hollywood carousel and enroll in school.
It was at about this time, in 2007, that The O.C., a prime-time soap opera about beautiful, articulate, sun-kissed teenagers living in Orange County, was wrapping up its four-year run. The show had arrived on the scene with a tidal wave of buzz, its actors almost immediately splashed on magazine covers and pushed out onto red carpets; but after burning through plot at a rapid pace (its leading lady, Mischa Barton, saw her character get killed off somewhat unceremoniously in the third season), the show sputtered to a close, ending with a truncated final season. But The O.C.’s creators and show-runners, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, already had the beaches of Newport in their rearview mirror, with their sights on a next project. They had been sent Cecily von Ziegesar’s popular Gossip Girl book series, centered on a group of affluent, conniving New York private-school students. As soon as they finished reading the first book, the duo knew this was it. “We learned a lot of lessons [on The O.C.] and its kind of crazy four-year run that we wanted to take and apply to something moving forward, and we were really excited about doing something in New York,” Schwartz said over lunch in Los Angeles this past winter.
Meanwhile, a new television network, the CW, was simultaneously in the midst of a delicate birthing process. Formed by the union of the WB and UPN, the new network—led by then President of Entertainment Dawn Ostroff—was searching for an identity. “We knew we needed the defining show,” Ostroff (currently president of Condé Nast Entertainment) said. “You have to sort of catch the wind at your back. You have to really hit something that’s in the zeitgeist, or really going to matter to people in a way that becomes an emotional connection. And it was even more difficult for us, because we were going after a younger, more finicky audience.”
It was a perfect storm: a buzzy property, a hot creative team, and a new network. The official green light was a mere formality: Schwartz and Savage were off to the races.
Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Blake Lively, and Penn Badgley, at a gala at Cipriani Wall Street in October 2008.
Photograph by BILLY FARRELL/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images.
There were two core figures at the center of the books—Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen—and casting them was at the top of Schwartz and Savage’s agenda. Waldorf is a brunette queen bee—controlling, poised, meticulous. Van der Woodsen, by contrast, is the blonde, effortlessly cool free spirit. Blair, the Veronica, inspires fear; Serena, the Betty, inspires envy. When they started to cast the show, Savage and Schwartz looked at online message boards, where fans of the book series had already decided that Lively—known at this point primarily for her role in 2005’s The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants—would be the perfect Serena. “We didn’t see a lot of other girls for Serena,” Schwartz said. “She has to be somebody that you believe would be sitting in the front row at Fashion Week eventually.”
Lively was not completely sold, though. “I said, ‘No, I want to go to college. Thank you, though.’ Then they said, ‘O.K., you can go to Columbia [University] one day a week. After the first year [of the show], it’ll quiet down. Your life will go back to normal and you can start going to school. We can’t put it in writing, but we promise you can go.’ So that’s why I said, ‘O.K. You know what? I’ll do this.’”
When I asked Lively if that arrangement ended up working out (even though I already knew the answer), she responded, laughing: “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.” She added, “But no, the show didn’t slow down. It just got more and more.”
If every generation has its one or two shows that prove defining, that essentially everyone seemed to watch as if there were no other choice in the matter, Gossip Girl—which is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its premiere this September—would be that show for anyone who was a teenager or twentysomething (or, in many cases, older than that!) when it first aired. The show premiered before Instagram or Snapchat had launched, and before Facebook and Twitter had become the juggernaut forces they are today. But the premise of the series—an anonymous blogger, who goes by “Gossip Girl,” monitors the goings-on of a small group of glamorous Upper East Side high-schoolers—predicted, to an almost eerie extent, what was to come for our culture. The notion of a group of people being callously gossiped about online by an anonymous troll certainly has resonance in our current climate, in which celebrities (as well as politicians and public figures) are often blogged about with a blithe and biting disregard. As Kristen Bell, who voiced “Gossip Girl” for the show, said to me, “[Schwartz and Savage] were spearheading: ‘What if the Internet is just a place to judge people? What if that’s what it turns into?’ And they turned out to be Nostradamus.” (On a meta level, the actors on the show were among the last wave of young television stars who were not broadcasting their every move on social media—which perhaps helped to create a certain air of mystery and intrigue about them, one that doesn’t exist in the same way for young television stars now.)
The show also debuted at the very end of the period during which people regularly watched shows live when they aired (as opposed to on their DVRs or laptops or phones). As Ostroff put it, “It holds such a place in pop culture and in society where people just really say, ‘I remember everything around that show. I remember where I was [when watching it] and what I was doing in my life.’”
Viewers wanted to dress like the characters; they wanted their haircuts and jewelry and ringtones; they wanted to talk like them and listen to the music they listened to. At some New York City private schools, the show—which featured its lead characters partaking in all sorts of illicit antics—was in fact “banned,” which of course only served, in all likelihood, to make the students want to watch it more. New York magazine featured the (scantily clad) cast of the show on its cover toward the end of the first season, proclaiming in its cover headline (only semi-tongue in cheek), “BEST. SHOW. EVER.”
At its core, though, while the fashion and music and Lively-ness of it all no doubt drew a large swath of viewers, the central, relatable dilemmas faced by the main characters—Blair and Serena, as well as Brooklyn “lonely boy” and eventual Serena boyfriend Dan Humphrey, ostentatious bad boy and Blair soul-mate Chuck Bass, and pinup prepster Nate Archibald—were what kept people tuning in. “Phones get updated, but the inner life of teenagers, and the things that they struggle with, are pretty timeless, regardless of what device they’re on,” Schwartz said.
At many New York City private schools, the show—which featured its lead characters partaking in all sorts of illicit antics—was in fact “banned.”
There was no shortage of high-profile guest stars throughout the run, either, as luminaries from the world of fashion, publishing, music, and art appeared on the series. Lady Gaga performed “Bad Romance” on the show, right as she was approaching the height of her fame; David O. Russell filmed a multi-episode arc, as, yes, a director. And, that’s right, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner made an appearance, in a club scene filmed at the Boom Boom Room. (“They did it for the money,” Schwartz said, with a laugh.) Trump said in an interview at the time that she never missed an episode of Gossip Girl. “I think I’m a cross between Blair Waldorf and Lily van der Woodsen when it comes to the style,” she told InStyle.
While the show was as zeitgeist-y as zeitgeist-y gets, Gossip Girl never did particularly well in the ratings. But it has enjoyed a continuing popularity, even 10 years later. It’s currently available on Netflix, where a new generation is discovering the show for the first time. (Chace Crawford, who played Nate, noted, “It’s so weird how the same demographic has been frozen in time. Fourteen- to 20-year-olds still come up to me freaking out and it’s because they binge [the show] on Netflix.”) And in other countries, the show has come to represent the allure and glamour of New York. Nearly every cast member I spoke with—from Crawford to Wallace Shawn—reported that they, to this day, are regularly stopped by foreigners who recognize them from the show. Ostroff recalled that, about seven or eight years ago, she had a meeting with Chinese executives, who told her that the most illegally streamed show in China was not C.S.I. or Lost, but Gossip Girl.
During the filming of the pilot in 2007—the cast now assembled in New York—Schwartz and Savage felt confident they had magic on their hands. In addition to Lively as Serena, they had cast relative unknowns Leighton Meester, Crawford, Penn Badgley, and Ed Westwick as Blair, Nate, Dan, and Chuck, respectively. Savage remembered an early cast outing as the moment it hit her that things were clicking: “We all went to see Blades of Glory and [we were] walking with them [and thinking], ‘I don’t know what the rest of the world is going to think, [but] when I see these kids together, I feel excited.’” The actors felt they were a part of something that could be quite special, as well. Crawford said he remembers meeting Meester at his audition and thinking, at first, “I just don’t see her as Blair Waldorf. I can’t see it.” But then she turned around “slyly in her chair,” with Blair’s soon-to-be-trademark headband on, and she snapped into character. “I just remember thinking, ‘That girl can act. She’s the perfect girl for this.’” Schwartz recalled Meester’s audition, and her determination to get the part, vividly: “She 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, [Leighton] went to the sink and dyed her hair. She wanted it.’”
Lively said, frankly, she was scared about the attention that was to come. “I’m actually a very shy person and the idea of losing my anonymity was one that was scary to me,” she said. “I remember saying when I read this script, ‘Whoever does this will not be able to walk out of their house ever again and be the same as before they started this.’ You could tell it was a cultural phenomenon. That was both exciting and thrilling, but also very scary.” (Meester, who actually auditioned first for Serena before telling the producers she felt she was a better fit for Blair, was a bit more blasé in reflecting on the project’s beginnings: “I think it was just the normal, typical pilot season audition for me. . . . I auditioned and then I tested once and then we did a screen test with everybody. And then, that was it . . . I dunno. I got it.”)
All from Everett Collection.
On the precipice of what promised to be great fame, Texas native Crawford and Westwick, a young Brit in America on a work visa, decided to move into a two-bedroom apartment in Chelsea together. (Schwartz and Savage said they were adamant about casting Westwick, who had initially auditioned to play Nate; when the network asked them to prep a backup in case his visa situation did not work out, the duo refused.) Before the show had even aired, but after casting had been announced, Westwick and Crawford were already getting swarmed when they ventured out in the wild. Crawford recalled attending an Arctic Monkeys show with Westwick, where they got a sense of what their future might hold. “We had these girls coming up to us, and they were kind of freaking out about it: ‘Oh, we love the books.’ [Ed and I] kept looking at each other like, shit, man.”
The CW moved ahead with the series after seeing the pilot, and Ostroff now says the show was essentially to the CW what House of Cards is seen as for Netflix—the singular series that came to represent an entire network. While Schwartz and Savage were able to develop an audience over the fall, it was the spring of 2008 that the show really hit its stride, in part thanks to the timing of the writer’s strike. “The CW, because they couldn’t just run repeats or game shows, [Gossip Girl is] all they had,” Schwartz said. “They kept re-running the show during the strike so more and more people were watching.” The show’s return was preceded by a controversial “OMFG” marketing campaign, featuring stills of the cast in states of undress, with pull quotes saucily warning that the show was, “Every parent’s nightmare” and “Mind-blowingly inappropriate.” (Again, what better way to make sure teenagers did whatever it took to watch?) When the writers returned to craft the new batch of episodes post-strike, “people knew what the show was,” executive producer Joshua Safran said.
It was not long before packs of paparazzi were stalking the set, not dissimilar from the way in which “Gossip Girl” and “her” sources snapped Serena and Blair on the show itself—and it was impossible for the cast to so much as walk to set without getting swarmed. Hairstylist Jennifer Johnson said, “I had a little S.U.V. at the time and I had it parked out front of our location at the school. There were just so many fans everywhere, and when we wrapped at the end of the day, there were handprints all over my car. It was like the Beatles were inside.” Sam Robards, who played Nate’s father, laughed as he remembered what it was like to shoot scenes with Crawford: “It was a Friday night around midnight, and we were up on Fifth Avenue and 95th Street, and I looked across the street and there were, like, 200 kids with cell phones, and I said to Chace, ‘Hey buddy, there are 200 kids on a Friday night in the city [here] . . . and they ain’t taking my picture.’” Michelle Trachtenberg, who played impeccably dressed menace Georgina Sparks, said she remembers fans trying to “pet [her] hair” as she made her way through the set: “I opened up my trailer door to see, literally, on my first day, I think 40 paparazzi. That’s when I was like, ‘O.K., I need my own bodyguard.’”
Crawford said while he didn’t necessarily mind the frenzy at the time, he reflects on it now somewhat differently. “I think I used to feel like I was fine with it, but looking back on it from a different perspective now, I never really got used to it. . . . I’m a private person and I don’t like being the center of attention.” Meester was somewhat flippant about the initial fan attention: “I think they were mostly there for the guys.”
While Sex and the City had blazed the trail for a New York-based show that enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the worlds of fashion and commerce, Gossip Girl set trends for the coveted 18 to 34 demographic in a particularly emphatic way. “It was very clear from the beginning that we wanted to editorialize television and give it this high-fashion, international flair,” costume designer Eric Daman explained. Savage said, “We talked about how the show, on the one hand, is telling this fictional story about these characters, but it’s also kind of working as a lifestyle magazine.”
Johnson, who remains close friends with Lively, said she was amazed to see how much interest there was in how Lively’s hair was styled, comparing it to Jennifer Aniston’s iconic haircut on Friends: “A lot of magazines would call and want to do interviews on how you get the ‘Serena look.’ . . . It was like ‘the Rachel look.’” A 2008 New York Times story noted, “Merchants, designers, and trend consultants say that Gossip Girl . . . is one of the biggest influences on how young women spend,” with a Bloomingdale’s fashion director explaining that the show had had a “profound influence on retail.” Daman said, “When we came back with Season 2, so many designers were lining up and wanting to be a part of it—they wanted their stuff on either Blake or Leighton.”
Daman said the bold looks Westwick’s Chuck Bass, ostensibly the show’s romantic male lead, wore on the show—which involved purple suits, patterned handkerchiefs, and bowler hats—had a profound impact on the marketplace, as well. “I think because he was a Brit and had a different understanding of clothing and what it means, he was game day one,” Daman said. “He had a very big influence on menswear and how men dress today, and on what getting dressed up means. Menswear, at that point, was still very Jersey Shore. . . . I’m very proud we got to break through to the men and be like, ‘No, it’s O.K. to dress up. You’re not gonna look like some big pansy because you’re in a fucking suit, dude. Suck it up, put on the bow tie.’”
While men may have taken fashion cues from the show, they perhaps gleaned other recreational benefits from it as well. Zuzanna Szadkowski, who played Blair’s housekeeper (a fan-favorite character), said she remembers “a guy coming up to me who had a suit and a briefcase, this total Wall Street Guy, and he was all like, ‘Oh my god, Dorota!’ He told me, and a couple of other guys have told me this, too, that they used to watch the show because it was a great way in with the ladies.”
While the tabloids may have desperately hoped for some Lively-Meester on-set friction, this, by all first-hand accounts from those involved with the show, was not the case—though, god knows, that did not stop the tabloids from conjuring such tales. “It’s funny,” Trachtenberg said, “Because when we were filming, there was, ‘Leighton hates Blake, Blake hates Leighton, everyone hates Blake, everyone hates Leighton, everyone hates Chace,’ and blah, blah, blah. It really wasn’t. We were all chill. It was cool.” Makeup artist Amy Tagliamonti explained, “I have to say there was too much work to do for things to be that dramatic behind the scenes. It’s not like [the actors] were trying to get followers for Instagram; nobody was trying to do all the things that I feel like people do now, like, ‘Let’s get attention.’ Everyone was just doing their thing.”
Safran—who was Savage and Schwartz’s second-in-command and who wrote nearly every premiere and finale of the series—had this to say about the two leading ladies: “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.” But even though they may have had different demeanors, the two got along just fine on set: “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.”
Lively’s life ended up mirroring and then eclipsing that of Serena, the character she was playing. “It was funny,” Schwartz said, “When we first started talking to Blake, it was like, in order for this show to work and for you to be the ultimate New Yorker, you’re going to have to host Saturday Night Live and be in a Woody Allen movie.” “And be on the cover of Rolling Stone,” Savage added. (Lively has by now checked all three of these achievements off her list.) When Lively first appeared on the cover of Vogue, Schwartz remembers thinking, “Oh my god, this is . . . Blair’s nightmare. It really felt like life imitating art.” Costume designer Daman noted, recalling Lively “running around on Christian Louboutin’s moped” when they filmed a few episodes of the series in Paris: “I feel like Serena and Blake definitely had a symbiotic relationship: in their lives and in the show.”
From left: by James Devaney/WireImage, by Justin Campbell/BuzzFoto/FilmMagic, by Jeffrey Ufberg/WireImage, by Justin Campbell/BuzzFoto/FilmMagic.
For the first few seasons of the show, Lively was dating Badgley—their characters dated on the show, as well—but the two were careful to keep the relationship largely hidden from the public eye. “The shocking thing was, I found out on the set of the Season 2 finale that Blake and Penn had broken up months before,” Safran said. “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.”
Lively said she now sees that those in power likely were thrilled about the fact that her personal life was receiving as much attention as it was. “Stepping back from it, I can see it,” she said. “But I remember there was one point where we were just afraid of how our personal lives overlapping our work life could be perceived by our bosses. [But then] we were like, ‘Oh no, that’s exactly what they want.’ They wanted us all to date. They wanted us all to wear the same clothes that we’re wearing on the show. They wanted that, because then it fed their whole narrative. People could buy into this world.”
I asked Lively if it was ever surreal or strange to have her own life seemingly bleed into Serena’s and vice versa. She responded emphatically that, in fact, playing Serena only clarified for the actress how much her real life was not like her character’s. “At the time,” Lively says, “I was wearing the same clothes and doing fashion shoots, and dating the same person that my character was dating—or sometimes that person [Dan] was my brother, you never know with Serena—and because of that, what people were projecting onto me was that I was Serena . . . We look the same, and we acted the same as far as they could tell, because I wasn’t doing anything but that show. If [Badgley and I] were photographed walking down the street, they didn’t know if it was a paparazzi shot or if it was a shot from the show. . . . At the time, what was heightened was, wow, it all looks similar from the outside, but it’s so different on the inside.”
Badgley—who declined to be interviewed for this piece—has spoken publicly, since the show ended, about his displeasure with aspects of the series. “Penn didn’t like being on Gossip Girl, but . . . he was Dan. He may not have liked it, but [his character] was the closest to who he was,” Safran said, in reference to Badgley’s sardonic, outsider, Brooklyn-dwelling character, who pined for Serena for a long time before eventually dating her, and then no longer dating her by series’s end.
Towards the close of the show’s run, as might be expected for any television show producing 20 or more episodes almost every year and featuring a slew of gorgeous young stars with an increasing number of career options, the cast became restless. Meester was pursuing a pop music career on the side. Taylor Momsen—who played rebellious Jenny Humphrey—left the show to record and tour with her rock band, the Pretty Reckless. (Kelly Rutherford, who played Serena’s mom, remembered: “You’d walk by the dressing rooms and everyone would be doing their music.”) “Some of the actors were not entirely happy to be there after a certain point,” Safran explained. “And no matter what we did, they were never going be happy. . . . They were kids. They were young.”
Billy Baldwin, who played Serena’s father, recounted Lively getting a call from set one day informing her she’d been offered a movie role opposite Billy’s brother Alec. “She goes, ‘Yeah, he’s gonna play my husband.’ And I said, ‘So in what universe is it just or right or fair that he plays your husband and I play your father?’ And she started laughing and said, ‘That makes you Alec’s father-in-law.’ And I was like, ‘Say that again and I’m gonna stab you with a pen or something. Or, like, break your kneecap.’”
Lively asked for the show to shift production to Los Angeles while she filmed the 2012 movie Savages, directed by Oliver Stone. She began dating Leonardo DiCaprio, which also—inadvertently, thanks to her innovative means of communication with the actor—came to influence the content of the show itself. “We learned a lot from Blake,” Safran said. “When I think about shooting the L.A. episodes, Blake was dating [DiCaprio] at the time, and she had this thing where she had a doll that she took photos of that she sent to Leo. Blake was way ahead of the curve. It was pre-Instagram. She was documenting her life in photographs in a way that people were not yet doing.”
Lively herself said that she doesn’t think of her work on the show so much like acting as she does being part of a machine. “It didn’t really feel like acting as much . . . It felt like we were in the center of a marketing machine, a cultural pop phenomenon. We were creating three episodes at once sometimes, we were given our lines at the very last minute, we didn’t know where our characters were going; there was no planning or arc. . . . It almost felt like a sketch show. We were basically sort of reading off of cue cards. There were people taking pictures the whole time and paparazzi jumping in front of the cameras—it felt like we were part of a cultural experiment.” She concluded, with a very Lively graceful landing, “There was something neat about that.”
“It didn’t really feel like acting as much . . . It felt like we were in the center of a marketing machine, a cultural pop phenomenon.”
While the interest in the show from the actors may have been waning by the show’s end, there was still enough for Russian hackers—again, Gossip Girl very ahead of the curve!—to attempt to infiltrate the show’s database in the fourth season. “All season, our scripts were ending up online, and we couldn’t figure out how,” one of the producers on the series explained. “We hired a private investigator. We didn’t understand what was happening, because everything was getting leaked, every detail. . . . A teenager, I think either [from] Russia or Bulgaria, had hacked one of the writer’s e-mails, and was selling scripts on eBay. But they were underage, so they couldn’t be prosecuted. It was a fucking production nightmare. We would have to ‘X’ out every script. We would have to print on red paper. . . . It was like there was a ‘Gossip Girl’ in our system.”
As it turned out--spoiler alert, if you’re one of those people working your way through the series for the first time now on Netflix—“Gossip Girl,” on the show, was revealed in the series finale to be Badgley’s character, Dan Humphrey, a decision that was seen as somewhat controversial, given it was tough to work out logistically how Dan would have been able to maintain the blog. (Both Nate and Eric van der Woodsen, Serena’s brother, had been considered as potential “Gossip Girls” by the writers earlier in the show’s run.)
Someone should let Ed Westwick know about the Dan reveal, though. The actor e-mailed me, in response to a question about favorite plotlines or memories from filming: “I still am not sure who GG was lol.”
The last episode of Gossip Girl aired in 2012, but the show’s continued relevance means that there is talk about revisiting the franchise. Many of the cast members seem quite excited by the notion. Wallace Shawn—who played Blair’s stepfather, Cyrus Rose—practically shouted, “Oh, I would jump at it.” Rutherford said, “I would be completely on board. And I think they should do it soon.” Lively? “Of course. I’m open to anything that’s good, that’s interesting, and that sort of feels necessary. . . . 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.” (Aside from Lively, the other young cast members have had trouble finding traction with film roles since the show’s end.)
When I asked Meester if she would ever want to revisit the character of Blair now, given rumors of a reboot or reunion, she responded, deadpan, “Yeah, I don’t really hear [talk of] that . . . I guess I hear that in fits and starts here and there, but it’s hard to say. If everyone was into it and if the timing was right, you know?” She trailed off, “I don’t want to say, ‘No, never . . .’”
Schwartz and Savage told me they think they “could be persuaded [to revisit the world of Gossip Girl] if there were new stories to tell.” New Line briefly flirted with producing a “new version” of the franchise as a film, though it has not moved forward. Von Ziegesar, who wrote the Gossip Girl books, told me that she would love to see a take of Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer, a horror adaptation she published in 2002 based on her original installment (in this version, “Serena comes back from boarding school to kill everyone”).
At one point during my conversation with Safran—which took place in the very thematically appropriate King Cole Bar at the St. Regis hotel—he said that “the saddest thing that has happened is that network television has decided that it is not important to tell aspirational stories.” He assessed, “Every show on any television network right now has a murder in it, or is dour. . . . We were working [on Gossip Girl] feeling like, ‘O.K., this is the beginning of something,’ and when I look back on it, it was almost like the end of something, actually.”
Full ScreenPhotos:Blake Lively Had a Truly Excellent 2016
The year began for Lively with the release of the movie her husband, Ryan Reynolds, had fought to make for years, Deadpool. The film would go on to be nominated for two Golden Globes in December and become the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time.
Photo: By Dave Alloca/StarPix/Rex/Shutterstock.
We came to Lively’s defense earlier this year, when it was reported that she had—quite unjustly—been asked to uncross her legs at a fashion show. We will reiterate here: if Blake Lively wants to come to your fashion show, you should just emanate thankfulness, bow your head in the direction of the Serena van der Woodsen poster in your office, and then let her sit however she damn pleases.
Photo: By Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images.
Lively and Reynolds attended a state dinner in March where they met the Canadian prime minster, Justin Trudeau.
Photo: By Andrew Harnik/A.P. Images/Rex/Shutterstock.
Few provide the Met Ball red carpet with as much “Look. At. Me” glamour—usually with a touch of Old Hollywood—these days as Lively does.
Photo: By Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images.
If you have never seen this photo before, well, we don’t know what to say to you. This is Lively (pregnant at the time), and, yes, the squad led by Taylor Swift, in the ocean off Rhode Island over July Fourth.
Photo: From AKM-GSi.
Lively joked on air with Jimmy Fallon that her daughter James believed that Fallon was her dad, due to some confusion related to a Fallon cardboard cutout in their home. That Lively, an unexpected goofball.
Photo: From NBC/Getty Images.
Photo: By Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images.
The year began for Lively with the release of the movie her husband, Ryan Reynolds, had fought to make for years, Deadpool. The film would go on to be nominated for two Golden Globes in December and become the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time.
By Dave Alloca/StarPix/Rex/Shutterstock.
We came to Lively’s defense earlier this year, when it was reported that she had—quite unjustly—been asked to uncross her legs at a fashion show. We will reiterate here: if Blake Lively wants to come to your fashion show, you should just emanate thankfulness, bow your head in the direction of the Serena van der Woodsen poster in your office, and then let her sit however she damn pleases.
By Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images.
Lively and Reynolds attended a state dinner in March where they met the Canadian prime minster, Justin Trudeau.
By Andrew Harnik/A.P. Images/Rex/Shutterstock.
Few provide the Met Ball red carpet with as much “Look. At. Me” glamour—usually with a touch of Old Hollywood—these days as Lively does.
By Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images.
This unlikely Kristen Stewart–Blake Lively friendship is one of our favorite celebrity friendships that we often forget exists.
By David M. Benett/Getty Images.
Lively was widely seen as the breakout star of the Cannes red carpet, and the dress that seemed to be the standout crowd-pleaser was this “Elsa” gown.
By Gisela Schober/Getty Images.
The Shallows was the cinematic triumph of the year, and we will hear no other arguments. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should rectify that immediately.
Courtesy of CTMG, Inc.
Seriously, though, and at the risk of overdoing it, The Shallows was enjoyable and suspenseful, and Lively—seen here at one of the premiere events—turned in a heartfelt, engaging performance.
By Michael Stewart/Getty Images.
“Full Jesse Spano” is how Lively captioned this one on her Instagram account.
By James Devaney/GC Images/Getty Images.
If you have never seen this photo before, well, we don’t know what to say to you. This is Lively (pregnant at the time), and, yes, the squad led by Taylor Swift, in the ocean off Rhode Island over July Fourth.
From AKM-GSi.
Lively joked on air with Jimmy Fallon that her daughter James believed that Fallon was her dad, due to some confusion related to a Fallon cardboard cutout in their home. That Lively, an unexpected goofball.
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, when it was reported that she had--quite unjustly--been asked to uncross her legs at a fashion show. We will reiterate here: if Blake Lively wants to come to your fashion show, you should just emanate thankfulness, bow your head in the direction of the Serena van der Woodsen poster in your office, and then let her sit however she damn pleases.](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_svuSuT_nltUWhdIfr5ibP2g-gXfAyg5WVj7df4gcwTd_O2jSqV1R7K7x0gxTimXfR9tq-9GoMiBA=s0-d)
 with __Jimmy Fallon__ that her daughter James believed that Fallon was her dad, due to some confusion related to a Fallon cardboard cutout in their home. That Lively, an unexpected goofball.](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uCvaRe5TAlvwlG1J74Vzt2Rp_HJgffXJOji75H6kCzZN3zOi32uW0a0QjUIT63_ccquZA3r_g3cg=s0-d)
, born this fall, for Reynolds’s [Walk of Fame ceremony](http://ift.tt/2wIVlLf) and their first public appearances.](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sdYI9VUCCFX8EjFPBXz0MYQ8PRXfBySIs-ujj3RFoQgboRV1oHGir-J-GETUwtnYqhGI9B25UVyQ=s0-d)
