Throughout Gossip Girl’s six-season run from 2007-2012, the CW series became as known for its influence on teenage culture as it was for its sharp one-liners and controversial plot lines. Ten years after its premiere, the show’s creators opened up about the behind-the-scenes process, revealing that star Blake Lively’s personal life was a key factor in the show’s fictional content.
“We learned a lot from Blake,” executive producer Joshua Safran told Vanity Fair in an interview published on Wednesday, August 30. “When I think about shooting the L.A. episodes, Blake was dating [Leonardo DiCaprio] at the time, and she had this thing where she had a doll that she took photos of that she sent to Leo. 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.”
Us Weekly exclusively confirmed in October 2011 that Lively and DiCaprio split after five months of dating. Prior to The Wolf of Wall Street actor, Lively dated her Gossip Girl costar Penn Badgley for three years. Safran told VF that the two, who played onscreen off-and-on loves throughout the show’s run, kept their split a secret on set until their last day of filming the show’s second season.
“The shocking thing was, I found out on the set of the season 2 finale that Blake and Penn had broken up months before,” Safran said. “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.”
