It's a rare treat to witness intimate pop culture reunions, especially when they involve our fave stars from the early aughts. This week, actor Penn Badgley of Gossip Girl and You fame surprised us by inviting his former on-screen sibling, Taylor Momsen, for a nostalgia-filled chat on his Podcrushed podcast. *Cue the Kristen Bell voice over.*
The two young stars graced our screens as Dan and Jenny Humphrey on the early 2000s teen sensation, Gossip Girl. At the beginning of the series, the brother-sister duo felt like the most accessible characters amongst their über-wealthy peers. They lived a more modest lifestyle (which in Gossip Girl world, still means living in a huge loft in DUMBO) and had more down-to-earth costumes while their Upper East Side schoolmates ran around with multiple Bergdorf Goodman bags at a time.
Around season 2, however, Jenny had an aesthetic shift that reflected more of Taylor's IRL style. "Style-wise [Jenny's costumes] definitely started to transition a little bit more to my own personal taste," Taylor says on the latest episode of Podcrushed. "I cut and bleached my hair at some point and didn't exactly tell anyone...we weren't filming for awhile and I changed my hair. When we came back, they were like 'Well, we gotta write this in now.'"
While viewers might have been shocked at Jenny's transformation (I was, at least), taylor-ing Jenny's look, and moving from feminine to edgy, actually helped Taylor through the difficulties of filming Gossip Girl. Articles at the time claimed Taylor was "unprofessional," and being the youngest member on the GG set (Taylor was 12 when they filmed the pilot, Penn was 20) was incredibly difficult — especially since it was such a public filming process.
"It was weird for me suddenly overnight being tabloid famous, which is a different kind of famous," she says. "They would photograph me on set [on the streets of New York City]...as my character and put it in the tabloids as 'Taylor Momsen'...and that started to really bug me because my identity was getting kind of taken over...People had this perception of me that wasn't me and I became really hyper-aware of how I carried myself."
"As I was growing and changing, they wanted the character to reflect that, too," she continues. "At the time, I was sitting there going, 'Well, at least I don't hate this outfit.'"
Taylor started her rock band The Pretty Reckless in 2009 (they're still together today), and while fans might have viewed her as an actress-turned-singer, she always cared more about music than anything else. When she got old enough to realize that she could control her life, she made an almost-immediate 180.
“It was like a click," Taylor says. "I woke up one morning and went, ‘Wait a second. I don’t have to do this? I don’t have to do this other job? I can just play in my band and tour and write songs?’"
Even though it was more a little bit more complicated to leave a hit TV show than just not show up to work, she was able to stop working on Gossip Girl. Jenny leaves Manhattan for London in season 4, and doesn't return until the final scene of the series finale.
“They went, ‘Well, we can’t let you out of your deal, but we can write you out of the show, so you can go on tour,'” she continues. “They really allowed me to follow my dream, and I’m forever grateful and thankful to them for that.”
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Featured image via The CW/YouTube
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