Gossip Girl Writer Reveals Dan Humphrey Wasn't the Original Gossip Girl

Good morning, Upper East Siders! Gossip Girl here, and have we got a scoop for you. While it was revealed in the finale of the popular CW show that the one and only Dan Humphrey, AKA Lonely Boy, AKA a writer who somehow managed to get his work placed in both The New Yorker and Vanity Fair during the show despite never really actually writing, was the brains behind Gossip Girl. However, according to the show's writer and executive producer Joshua Safran, Dan wasn't the original choice for the titular character who chronicles the lives of Manhattan's elite: it was Nate Archibald!

BuzzFeed reports that Safran stopped by the Vulture Festival to talk both the original show and the upcoming HBO reboot, and he spilled the beans about how Dan ended up as GG.

"I like to joke that Dan was Gossip Girl because I had left the show by then. Dan was not my intended Gossip Girl, so honestly, you'd have to ask someone else," he said. "But I understand why Dan was Gossip Girl. I just had my heart set on Nate." And apparently, before Nate, he thought Serena's brother Eric van der Woodsen should have been Gossip Girl, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it. (We, like Blair, thought it was Dorota.)

"We worked hard to kind of lay in tiny seeds about it being Eric, and then the NY Post wrote an article saying that Gossip Girl was Eric so we were like, 'We gotta scratch that,'" Safran revealed. "Then one of the writers realized that Nate had never sent a tip in to Gossip Girl, which is true at least through the end of season five. Nate never sent in a tip in through all of those episodes, which is when we're like, 'Oh, well then he's Gossip Girl.'" Imagine if Nate had been able to incorporate Gossip Girl into his newspaper, the Spectator!

Safran is returning for the GG reboot, and while we don't know when the show will premiere, we do know that it's set about 12-13 years after the finale, so in "real time," and will feature high schoolers at Constance Billard Academy, Serena and Blair's alma mater. The original cast won't be in the new show (we think), save for Kristen Bell as narrator, and the cast will be more diverse than the '00s version.

That's about all we know so far, so until it hits our TV screens, we'll be busy rewatching the original series for the hundredth time and imagining what life would have been like had sweet, golden boy Nate been unmasked as Gossip Girl. XOXO!

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Originally Appeared on Glamour