All you Gossip Girl fans out there absolutely need to read Vanity Fair's new secret-spilling profile, published in anticipation of the show's upcoming 10-year anniversary. If you're too lazy to read the whole thing (seriously, read the whole thing!), we've picked out some especially juicy facts.
1. Producers reached out to Blake Lively because fans wanted her to play Serena.
Executive producers Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz turned to message boards for casting suggestions. That's where they found that fans of the GG book series believed Blake would be perfect for the part of 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.” Mission accomplished!
2. Blake almost didn't take the role because she had her eye on Columbia University.
"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,'" Lively explained to VF. "'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.’"
As you can probably guess, because of the show's popularity, Blake never made it to Columbia, but her character did (briefly) attend the school in Season 4.
3. Leighton Meester and Blake weren't friends.
Rumors about an on-set feud between the on-screen BFFs were the norm. Executive producer Joshua Safran set the record straight, saying the leading ladies got along but they weren't friends. "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."
4. Blake was scared of the popularity that would come with the show.
It's hard to imagine that one of this era's biggest celebs was worried about being well-known. "I’m actually a very shy person and the idea of losing my anonymity was one that was scary to me," Blake 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."
5. Penn Badgley and Blake kept their breakup a secret for months.
Everyone knows Dan and Serena dated IRL, but not even their coworkers knew when they broke up. Safran told VF, "The shocking thing was, I found out on the set of the Season 2 finale that Blake and Penn had broken up months before. 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."
6. When Blake dated Leonardo DiCaprio, she sent him photos of a doll…in a non-creepy way.
I'm still confused by this, but apparently this doll helped Blake communicate with Leo on the down low. "We learned a lot from Blake. 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," Safran said. "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."
7. Ed Westwick is still in the dark about Gossip Girl's identity.
Josh Duoff, who wrote the Vanity Fair profile, emailed Westwick about his favorite GG storylines and memories. According to Duoff, Ed responded, "I still am not sure who GG was lol."
I highly encourage you to check out Vanity Fair's full profile. There are plenty more secrets where those came from.