‘Gossip Girl’: Why Blake Lively and Leighton Meester Were Never Friends

Gossip Girl is back! Well, maybe not in exactly the same format or with the same cast that we knew before, but the same drama, backstabbing, and conniving that we all grew to know and love, will surely be a part of the new version of the show.

News of the reboot has had fans going back and reexamining everything that they knew about the show and its cast.

One of the best things about Gossip Girl was the relationships between the characters. Namely, the one between Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf. Though the girls were extremely different and could be petty towards one another every now and then, they always had each other’s back. But apparently, the relationship between the actresses who played them, Blake Lively and Leighton Meester, was nowhere near as good.

What was Meester and Lively’s relationship like in real life?

Often times, real life doesn’t imitate art. From the moment they met, it was clear that Meester and Lively weren’t going to be friends. They were just too different.

“Blake is very much in the moment,” writer Joshua Safran once told Vanity Fair. “Blake knows what’s happening. She knows this movie’s coming out, this band is happening. Leighton [on the other hand] was very removed and very quiet, and, after her scenes were done, she would wander the stage. I had this image of her just in these gorgeous dresses with a book in her hand, sort of a little bit out of focus out in the corners.”

Though the girls may not have gotten along, they were great at pretending that they did.

“Blake and Leighton were not friends,” Safran continued. “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.”

There was no animosity between the women, they just simply weren’t each other’s cup of tea.

“We were all chill. It was cool,” Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Georgina Sparks, told the outlet.

Were any members of the cast friends?

Ed Westwick and Chace Crawford, who played Chuck Bass and Nate Crawford, decided to live together in Chelsea once they started filming.

“Initially Ed and I became roommates here in New York because we didn’t know if the show was going to last or not,” Crawford told Interview in 2009. 

Their friendship really blossomed at an Arctic Monkeys concert.

“We had these girls coming up to us, and they were kind of freaking out about it: ‘Oh, we love the books.’ [Ed and I] kept looking at each other like, sh-t, man,” Crawford told Vanity Fair.

Did anyone in the cast date?

Though few friendships may have blossomed from the show, relationships certainly did.

Penn Badgley, who played Dan Humphrey, dated Lively in real life, Meester dated Sebastian Stan, who played Carter Baizen, and Westwick and Jessica Szohr, who played Vanessa Abrams, also spent some time together. Even Matthew Settle and Kelly Rutherford, who played Rufus Humphrey and Lily van der Woodsen, were rumored to be dating at one point.

“They wanted us all to date,” Lively told the outlet. “They wanted us all to wear the same clothes that we’re wearing on the show. They wanted that, because then it fed their whole narrative. People could buy into this world.”