Leighton Meester loves Gossip Girl. I would like to make that explicit. She loves it for the life it brought her. She loves it for the career it opened up for her. She loves it for allowing her to play the Upper East Side’s twitchy, scheming teen queen Blair Waldorf, when Meester herself was a twentysomething New York cliché, dazzled by the bright lights of the concrete jungle that dreams are made of. She. Loves. Gossip. Girl. “I wanted a job,” she remembers, “and I wanted that one.”
If you’re inclined to be deterministic about it, you might even say Gossip Girl is the reason Leighton Meester married the man she did – The OC’s Adam Brody – which means the beloved, smutty high-school drama is the reason she has the son and daughter she has now. It’s why she’s sitting in front of a stranger (me) in her sunny Los Angeles home (via Zoom), drinking tea, and answering prying questions about things that happened to her a decade ago.
