Believe it or not, Blake Lively drama goes back much farther than the current scandalous lawsuit.
On Wednesday her ex-boyfriend Penn Badgley opened up about their strained relationship and how it was a “struggle” to balance his love life with the Gossip Girl franchise.
Badgley chatted with Alex Cooper for the new episode of Call Her Daddy and came clean about what it was like to come of age as a young, famous New Yorker—both onscreen and off.
“For six years, you’re living in New York City, you’re in your early 20s… you [and your character] kind of had parallels,” said Cooper, pointing to the hit series that followed a group of wealthy New York students. Along with living in the Big Apple, she said, “You were dating Blake Lively, you were dating Serena on the show.”
She continued: “Do you feel like you were able to separate your actual job from your reality and were actually able to grow in your 20s? Or did it all feel like it was kind of merged?”
“It was the struggle,” said Badgley, now 38. “When you do a television show you’re doing it constantly. Because of the nature of that show and because of celebrity culture at that time, especially.”
The You star said that it was hard to take healthy space from Dan Humphrey, his character. He recalled doing dating podcasts and “constantly” feeling the need to prove himself.
“You suddenly feel the need to perform and you’re like ‘why can’t I just say something f—ing normal?’” he said.
After six seasons, Badgley felt too much overlap with his TV persona. “There’s not enough separation, I think, for anybody,” he said. “You’re seen as this person, you’re called their name out on the street, you also have to constantly be that person at work. I was 20, 21, 22. I didn’t have the emotional maturity to differentiate myself, just in terms of self worth.”
He continued: “What people seemed to think about Dan seemed to be what people thought of me.”
Badgely dated Lively from 2007 to 2010 in a whirlwind romance that captivated fans. While his character became smitten with Serena van der Woodsen, Badgely fell in love with the real-life Lively.
Years later, Lively’s caught up with her own fiasco that’s playing out a little too similarly to a Gossip Girl debacle. She and It Ends With Us co-star Justin Baldoni are tangled in a vicious legal battle and both blame each other for their smeared reputation.
Badgley’s largely stayed out of the drama.
The actor is more focused on kicking off the final season of You, which premiers Thursday.
Badgely, who has depicted seriously complicated relationships in many shows, said he was “starved for many kinds of intimacy” growing up and that he didn’t have a male role model until much too late.
He said he’s had a handful of longterm relationships but never liked dating because it felt like a “performance.” He longed for connection but also idolized some harmful “misconceptions we have, modern love mythology, the way that a relationship should be, the way that you should feel like it does to watch Titanic.”
He said he hated the “coarse” and “corrosive” pressure from society to “sow your wild oats.”
“I sound like an 80 year old,” he added, laughing.
Badgley’s now happily married to singer Domino Kirke and said he’s trying to give their children what he never experienced growing up, especially by unlearning toxic masculinity.
While he said his career is far from over, he confessed that it has been difficult to “grow beyond” the Gossip Girl legacy and branch out to new things.
That didn’t stop him from divulging how the whole cast wanted the notorious Gossip Girl to be Dorota, Blair Waldorf’s maid. But the shocking finale revealed it was Dan the whole time.
“It needed to be one of the core six, otherwise nobody cares,” he told Cooper.
“Oh my God, you get to call yourself one of the core six?” she asked. “That’s like a badge of honor.”
He replied: “I’m not just the core six, I’m Gossip Girl, baby!”
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