Penn Badgley & Chace Crawford Have a Virtual 'Gossip Girl' Reunion
Gossip Girl stars Penn Badgley and Chace Crawford reunited via video chat for Variety's Actors on Actors interview series.
The former costars reminisced over their time on the show nearly a decade ago and planned to reunite in L.A. to rewatch episodes of the reboot's first season and live-tweet it along the way.
Spotted: Dan Humphrey and Nate Archibald getting chummy over Zoom.
Seven and a half years after the Gossip Girl's final episode, former costars Penn Badgley (Dan) and Chace Crawford (Nate) reunited virtually for a Q&A for Variety's Actors on Actors series. The duo, who now star on Netflix's You and Prime Video's The Boys, respectively, looked back at their time working on the teen juggernaut, how they feel about the show now, and their hopes for the new cast of the upcoming HBO Max reboot.
Both Badgley and Crawford admitted that they haven't watched the hit 2000s show recently, slightly cringing over the idea. "Buddy, you have to strap me to a gurney and pop my eyes open like Clockwork Orange," Crawford joked. Similarly, Badgley said the last time he watched was six months after he met his now-wife and it was "very hard to watch." He added, "These snapshots of yourself when you're 20, 21, 22 years old. Who can enjoy that? Sometimes it's just uncomfortable."
But the duo came up with a proposal: They'll just watch some early episodes together. "We're doing that when you come to L.A. We'll have a drink," Crawford pitched.
"A little watching party," Badgley replied. "Dude, if we live-tweet a viewing of any episode of Gossip Girl, people would love that." He isn't wrong.
Despite the cringeworthy memories, Crawford admitted that "some of the most fun moments" on the Gossip Girl set were in the scenes he shared with Badgley. Badgley called some of the moments he shared on set with Crawford "remarkable," looking back at their early encounters at the Palace Hotel. "It feels like another lifetime to me," he said.
The pair also reminisced about a friendly and accommodating manager who tended to them on set. "The new kids won't get that treatment," Crawford said, referring to the new cast of HBO Max's upcoming Gossip Girl reboot.
"I wish them well. I really am also interested to see how people react to it," Badgley added.
As the showrunners have already teased, the next era of Gossip Girl is going to be very different from the original and have better representation of queer stories and non-white characters. Looking back at the original series, which debuted in 2007, Badgley acknowledged that the show served a different purpose and audience.
"People wanted to watch a show like Gossip Girl because it was aspirational," he told Crawford. "It was like an escape. It seemed like it struck a certain cultural chord because it was this aspirational fantastical vision of excess and wealth.
"But now, cut to 13 years later, people are not interested in that. And I think rightfully so. Now they're interested in deconstructing why we're so fascinated with that in the first place. We're interested in deconstructing those systems of privilege."
While relating Badgley's characters of Joe (You) and Dan, Crawford also briefly weighed in on Gossip Girl's controversial final revelation: that the titular online persona was controlled by Dan Humphrey all along.
"[Whatever] your reaction is on whether it was smart to do that or not, that he's Gossip Girl—it didn't really line up with the character of Dan. Right?" he asked.
Badgley simply replied, "Yeah."
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