Penn Badgley Tells Why He Hasn't Watched the 'Gossip Girl' Reboot

Gossip Girl alum and You star Penn Badgley reveals he hasn't had a chance to watch the new Gossip Girl reboot on HBO Max as of yet. He explains in an interview with Instyle that he and his wife of four years, singer Dominio Kirke, have been too busy keeping up with their new baby and work that he hasn't had the time to relax yet. "With a one-year-old and a 12-year-old and dogs and work, my wife and I," the actor shared, "we've still not finished Ted Lasso."

Badgley and Kirke welcomed their first child together in 2020. Kirke also has a son from a previous marriage. 

Before he took on the lovably villainous role in Netflix's You as serial killer Joe Goldberg, Badgley portrayed Dan Humphrey on Gossip Girl for four years. As many GG fans remember, he constantly surprised viewers with his involvement in the upper east siders drama, which all led up to the big reveal that he was behind the gossip blog all along. 

Badgley dove into why he felt the You casting decision was especially smart on a recent episode of SiriusXM's The Jess Cagle Show. "I do think it's brilliant casting in a way because there's some kind of, like, dialogue between these two shows that are very different, but at the same time, there's this very similar vein," he said. "There's this similar kind of bingey, frothiness, which characterizes so many shows. But yeah, I don't know how it would've worked with another person."

He says there was some major change in TV over the years that allowed for a villainous protagonist to become a popular role nowadays, which of course, contributed to the show's success. "I think Breaking Bad came out in 2008. That was, like, a huge moment where we're suddenly interested in a different kind of an antihero or a villain, you know?" he continued. "I think Dan, you know, was meant to be this sort of moral compass and that became increasingly irrelevant to the show, to Gossip Girl, [from] my understanding of it all. So to take somebody, you know, who's known for this particular kind of, like, you know, this iconography of nice guy, maybe without a lot of dimension, and then putting them in this—not to mention that, at the end of Gossip Girl, technically speaking, Dan was revealed to be a total sociopath. He was manipulating….So, you know, yeah, it was not lost." He adds: "Now, we're that much more accustomed to watching a show about a murderer and being like, 'Woo, I love that guy!'"