Penn Badgley Reveals the Surprising Way His Relationship With Blake Lively “Saved” Him

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Penn Badgley is busy doing a buncha press for You, and he just gave some rare comments about his former relationship with Blake Lively during an interview with Variety. Obviously, Penn and Blake dated while they were both starring on Gossip Girl, which thrust them into the spotlight.

Blake came up again in the convo after Penn was speaking about the “dark undercurrent that would bottom out in my later 20s” and was asked if substance abuse had anything to do with it. In response, he said, “To be honest, I never struggled with substance. Blake didn’t drink, and I think our relationship in some ways saved me from forcing myself to go down that road.”

Nowadays, Penn is married to Domino Kirke and they share a son, who was born in 2020. Penn recently revealed that he tries not to do sex scenes due to “fidelity” being important to him.

“I asked Sera Gamble can I just do no more intimacy scenes,” he said in a new episode of Podcrushed. “This is actually a decision I made before I took the show. I don’t think I have ever mentioned it publicly. One of the main things was, do I want to put myself back on a career path where I’m always playing the romantic lead? It’s really important to me, fidelity in every relationship and especially my marriage is important to me. It just got to a point where I don’t want to do that.”

He then elaborated on the subject to Variety, saying, “It’s important to me in my real life to not have them. My fidelity in my relationship. It’s important to me. And actually, it was one of the reasons that I initially wanted to turn the role down. I didn’t tell anybody that. But that is why.”

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