Mark my words: Future historians will one day credit Gossip Girl for the Age of the Influencer we’re living in now. Just think back to the mid-aughts (unless you’re Gen Z, in which case, pretend) when Blair Waldorf, Serena van der Woodsen, and the rest of the absurdly named Upper East Siders were already doing that thing we all do now—projecting sunny images of their “perfect” lives to everyone else.
They dressed up, partied, and smiled expensive orthodontist-crafted smiles through cheating scandals, friendship breakups, and family dramas. (Meanwhile, IRL, there were entire sites dedicated to the characters’ outfits, and people flocked to the hot spots featured onscreen.) (Yes, people actually used to say “hot spots” back when, you know, we could actually go to hot spots.)
And Gossip Girl, the omniscient blogger who spied on the show’s protagonists and drove the plot to evermore batshit heights, was there to obsessively track it all. Her constant snapshots of the ins and outs of the students at Constance Billard and St. Jude’s were ripe for everyone else to indulgently live vicariously through or bitterly hate-scroll through or both. But she did more than just party-report—she tore down the whole filtered facade and showed the world what was really going on. Basically, you can consider Gossip Girl, the character, an early prototype of the callout culture that now regularly holds politicians, celebrities, influencers, and anyone with an unpopular opinion accountable.
If only the OG blogger had been around when those now-famous paparazzi photos from the set of the *new* Gossip Girl—as in, the highly anticipated series “continuation” premiering on HBO Max in July—hit the internet last November. Because Kristen Bell’s voice would probably break in, bribe, or blackmail her way onto the COVID-19-quarantined and straight-up impenetrable set, and maybe then we’d know what the show’s “twist” is. The “twist” that apparently exists but is so super top secret that showrunner Josh Safran can’t even whisper it to me in confidence. Me, the writer of the Cosmo cover story about his show. (I tried.)
We do know that it all takes place in The After, a time when everyone is vaccinated against COVID-19 and wearing lipstick again while stuffing themselves into overstuffed subway cars (not that any of the kids on Gossip Girl would deign to take the subway, but still). While Blair, Serena, and the rest won’t be making any appearances, the 2.0 characters live in a world where their predecessors do exist out there somewhere.
Oh, and Gossip Girl has gone from blogger to something more like an all-encompassing social media platform. Sound vague? Yeah, that’s the point. “My hope is that we make it to airing and people don’t know,” Safran says of the grand surprise. “I would love to see that conversation happen in the context of people having seen it as opposed to talking about something they haven’t seen.”
Here are some more HBO Max PR team–approved details: Whitney Peak (of Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) plays Zoya, who, like Dan Humphrey, is our relatable-ish tour guide through the rarefied world inhabited by the likes of Audrey, played by Emily Alyn Lind (of 2019’s The Shining sequel, Doctor Sleep), a posh student at Constance whose mother is, of course, an athleisure designer. Audrey and Aki (model/skateboarder Evan Mock) have been dating for ages, and—still with me?—her best friend is teen influencer Julien (Jordan Alexander, who most recently starred alongside Juliette Lewis in Facebook Watch’s Sacred Lies).
They’re joined by—yep, there’s more—libertine Max (Thomas Doherty, from High Fidelity and Catherine the Great on Hulu) and rich do-gooder and German import Obie (Eli Brown, from Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists). As far as there are parallels between the old and new characters, the strongest seems to be between Chuck Bass and newbie Max: flirty boys with accents who are the life of the party. When asked about upcoming romantic scenes—specifically, “Does Max make out with boys?”—Thomas says, “Yes, I do get naked, and yes, I do indulge.”
Rounding out the group chat are Luna (Zión Moreno, of Netflix’s Mexican teen drama Control Z) and Monet (Savannah Smith of…well, acting class at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts; this is the still-undergrad’s first gig), both of whom fill Greek-chorus-type roles but are still fully fleshed-out characters with inner lives of their own. (Zión, who is trans and plays a trans high schooler on Control Z, takes her NDA se-ri-ous-ly and wouldn’t say whether or not Luna is trans as well.) And finally (for real this time), the mysterious Kate Keller, played by former fashion blogger turned actress and sometimes essayist Tavi Gevinson.
Tavi knows a thing or two about this whole influencer game. Back in the day, plenty of Gossip Girl critics critically asked, “Excuse me, and who are these high schoolers going to Fashion Week and running magazines??” The answer is…Tavi. Tavi was doing that. At age 12, she created the blog Style Rookie, which landed her front-row seats at legit Fashion Weeks, gigs at fashun fashion magazines, and partnerships with fahncy brands. When I point this out, she shrugs. What teen doesn’t have a platform now?
Even in a Zoom window, Tavi looks like the human manifestation of “dreamy aesthetic,” her blush-colored outfit a perfect complement to her apartment’s millennial-pink walls. “In a way, I haven’t even thought about that parallel,” she confesses. “Because it’s just not that weird anymore.”
No one—not Safran, not the show’s publicity team, not Tavi herself—would let it slip what her role is on the show. Kate Keller has been characterized as “ambition” in a promotional teaser, which probably means she’s either trying to get tickets to the Met Gala or she’s the World’s Best-Dressed Serial Killer. “Twist,” remember?
But alas, she is not the sort of serial killer who is immune to the mean tweets of h8rs. “We were shooting a scene in which I had to look at a phone and see nasty comments, and I immediately felt the little heart dagger,” Tavi tells me. “I was like, This is literally a prop phone with mean comments about another character, but just the very act of seeing them chaotically, one after another, pop up—I was like, I carry around my phone like it’s nothing, but it’s like a ticking bomb.”
And nothing goes boom! quite like ye olde Instagram. Before he was even cast, Eli went through and did a purge of his own account as his way of prepping for what was to come. “There’s almost like a sense of loss,” Eli says. “It’s like this page no longer belongs to me and my friends. It is this public forum for people to tell me what they think I should be posting and telling me that I’m not posting enough or giving their two cents about this, that, or the other. That kind of draws me away from it.”
His castmates seem similarly surprised by the sudden scrutiny. “I wasn’t expecting even half of the social media buzz and craze that I got,” says Savannah of what happened as more and more set images leaked during filming. “So I’m still thinking a little too modestly about what’s going to happen once the show drops. I’m just at home learning my lines. I forget sometimes that it’s literally Gossip Girl. And then I’m sitting in my bed and I’m doing something completely unrelated and I’m like, Wow, what’s happening? It smacks you in the face.”
Zión’s friends have started asking her about all this inevitable stardom. “They’re like, ‘You’re going to have a lot of attention. How are you going to deal with it? You’re so sensitive,’” she says. “I’m just going to pretend like everything’s the same and continue to do my job and create art that speaks to people. We’ll see how it goes.” Evan is worried but optimistic. Eh, sort of. “I just really hope I can go out my front door without, like, getting kidnapped or something,” he says.
Jokes aside, the topic of impending celebrity weighs heavily on the publicity-shy cast—it came up in every single convo I had with each Upper East Sider. They all lived through (or at least heard about) the first GG craze 10 years ago and remember paparazzi hiding in bushes to get a snap of filming. And now, with cameras on every smartphone and @Deuxmoi waiting to blow up everyone’s spot, it’s even harder out there for people who just want to make a good, juicy teen soap opera.
For Jordan, who is originally from Toronto and I-don’t-know-how-old-bc-she-won’t-say (“I just want to appear between 13 and 45 years old”), life already feels different. “My grandfather told me recently that he’s never known a famous person before,” she recalls from her Bushwick apartment while snacking on vegan cheese from her Smeg fridge. “I feel like nothing is going to impact me more than my grandpa saying that.”
At least the new kids at Constance Billard and St. Jude’s will have each other when the fame monster comes for them. They’re genuinely tight, not just because it makes for good show PR. The bond happened immediately: “The dynamic with the cast, from the second we all met, has always been like, Oh, we’ve known each other in different lives,” Emily says. Maybe there’s just something about a bunch of young people all being on the cusp of fame together, or maybe it’s because they were forced together during a pandemic.
With hard-core COVID-19 safety restrictions in place between takes, the coworkers turned besties, ironically, spend more time together off-set than they do on it. If you check out their Instagram accounts, they’re peppered with shots of each other hanging around New York City. Like your own “close friends” Stories, just way more glam.
When Thanksgiving rolled around and no one could travel home, Emily came up with a plan. “I decided I’m going to wrangle everyone together and we’re just going to go and spend a weekend upstate and relax and enjoy,” she remembers. She rented a cabin and everyone in the crew pitched in. Thomas, one of the few over 25, had to rent the minivan, which he drove while blasting old Paul Simon songs.
“I can arguably say that it was the best Thanksgiving I’ve ever had,” says Zión, who made her famous enchiladas. They all bonded by painting Thomas’s nails, hanging out with the horses and goats on the property, and piling in the hot tub. Contrary to what would happen on an episode of HBO Max’s Gossip Girl, swimsuits were worn.
Without these friendships, work life would’ve been a lot harder for Evan—it’s his very first acting job, and he wasn’t even sure he was interested in any of this before showrunner Safran, who had been using one of Evan’s modeling shots as inspiration for the character of Aki, approached him about auditioning. “I was very hesitant because I was like, Damn, I don’t know what to do,” he says. “But when we were filming for the first day all together on the Met steps, everyone made me feel so comfortable.” It helped that, you know, he was actually really good at it. “He doesn’t try to be an actor,” Emily says. “He’s not been trained, but he has this natural ability as an artist.” Still, Evan says, “I’m not going to fucking believe it until I see the footage.”
For Zión, she loves getting a do-over of her teen years. “Actual high school was never fun,” she says. “But this…are you kidding? I get to wear the most glamorous clothes and hang out with super-cool people and play out this fantasy of these crazy elitist, deluded kids.”
Let’s be honest: Memes about raging at the rich aside, what’s better, more delicious, or more satisfying in an ordering-cheese-fries-on-the-way-home-from-the-bar sort of way than watching the 1 percent squirm and self-combust? And no one served that capital-D drama better than the original Gossip Girl, a show that brought Chuck’s dad and mom back from the dead (he’d faked it, and she, ugh, long story). And remember when Blair married the Prince of Monaco and then divorced the Prince of Monaco (the Prince of Monaco!) all before making it to college graduation?
Maybe it’s the ultimate thrill of the American dream, showing us what our lives could be like when it’s finally our turn to ascend to the ruling class. Or maybe it’s the reverse: We want to see that no matter how rich you are, not all problems can be solved with money. There will still be arrests, addiction, and betrayal. To paraphrase Us Weekly: Rich People, they’re just like us but with fancier apartments, nicer clothes, and no student loan bill collectors bothering them incessantly.
But things are also different now. In the eight-plus years since the first GG went off the air, a collective sense of social consciousness has become more ubiquitous than Blair’s headbands. Today, even our privilege porn requires a side of, as Jordan describes, “What does it truly mean to have all these things and is that achieving happiness?”
“Part of the fun of watching the old one at the time was, Oh, this is what it’s like to be a very privileged teenager who can act with impunity, and living vicariously through that,” Tavi adds. “But with this show, class resentment is a much more explicit part of it, which I’m very in tune with.”
There’s an even more obvious change too. Just look at these photos (styled, btw, by Eric Daman, the cool-guy costume designer behind the original show and the new series) and see for yourself: The Gossip Girl Class of 2021 is stunningly diverse.
Showrunner Safran—who wrote on 111 episodes the first time around with then (and now) executive producers Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage—saw this iteration of the series as a chance to correct the sins of the past. “There are more than enough shows with white people centered in them,” he tells me from his book-lined New York apartment. “I’m married to a Mexican American man; I am a queer man. My world is not exclusively white. No one’s is.”
“Representation is everything,” says Whitney, who was born in Uganda and grew up near Vancouver. She’s drinking a green juice in the stairwell of the Brooklyn apartment she shares with her mother, who has to stay in town until 17-year-old Whitney celebrates her 18th birthday. “I want all the hers and the hes and the theys and the people of color from all over the world to be able to watch the show and think, That’s a person who looks like me. I don’t have to be the stereotypical idea of who I am.”
Savannah, a native Los Angeleno, boils down the importance of the show’s diversity to one thing. “Proximity. It’s really important for a Black girl, with twists in her hair, to be able to see someone in a position of power who looks like her,” she says. “And it’s also important for kids in the suburbs or kids who don’t have a lot of Black friends or friends of color just to generally see us depicted in different ways. I think this could really change things. Maybe they’re not learning these things at home, but they’re seeing them on Gossip Girl. How amazing is that?”
Very, says Emily. “We’re able to see these characters for who they are as people and not just how they identify,” she says. “It’s really important to normalize that.”
Sure, we’re talking about the high-varnish craziness of a teen soap that’s as frothy as a dalgona coffee TikTok, not, I don’t know, the latest Bong Joon Ho art film about income inequality. (Although a family locked in the basement could be a Gossip Girl plotline.) But that’s the genius of this new and improved Gossip Girl. We get all the messy hookups, glam fashion shows, and literally unbelievable cliff-hangers we could possibly want without having to worry about whether or not we’re hooked on a Problematic Fave. Like the original, it’ll no doubt look good…but what a game changer if it’ll feel good too.
Psst. Want to know even more gossip about, well, Gossip Girl? Come sit with us and we’ll tell ya ev-er-y-thing.
Photographs by Ben Watts. Graffiti by Trevor Andrew (@troubleandrew). Fashion by Eric Daman. Hair by Jennifer Johnson, Valerie Gladstone, Geo Hennings, and Erin Lunsford. Makeup by Amy Tagliamonti, Rachel Pagani,Danielle Terry, and Regina de Lemos. Props by Zachary Kinsella. Production by Crawford & Co Productions. Videography by Janet Upadhye and Jon Cortizo. Video produced by Erin Cortizo. Video editing by Janet Upadhye.
On the cover: On Thomas Doherty: Lacoste shirt; Dior Men shirt, sandals, and bag; Bode pants. On Savannah Smith: Area shirt; Paul Stuart suspenders; Luv Aj earrings. On Tavi Gevinson: Thom Browne cardigan and shirt; Phineas Cole at Paul Stuart tie; Pamela Love earrings. On Eli Brown: Boss jacket; Uniqlo U T-shirt; Miansai necklace. On Zión Moreno: Tory Sport vest; Dior bralette; Stella McCartney pants; Gucci belt; Roberto Coin earrings. Mejuri necklace; Jeannie Kim ring; Victoria Beckham heels. On Evan Mock: Bentgablenits jacket; Polo Ralph Lauren tank; Levi’s jeans; Chanel necklace. On Emily Alyn Lind: Stella McCartney jacket and pants; Dior bralette; Christian Louboutin heels; Cathy Waterman necklace. On Jordan Alexander: Prabal Gurung bustier; Germanier jeans; Chanel necklace; Justine Clenquet earring (left); Hillier Bartley earrings (right). On Whitney Peak: Dior anorak; Shay Jewelry necklace; Nickho Rey earrings; Kenneth Jay Lane ring (left). Jennifer Fisher ring (middle). Fry Powers ring (right).
Group shots: On Tavi: Bibhu Mohapatra dress; Chanel earrings. On Jordan: Bibhu Mohapatra gown; Retrofête earring (left); Susan Foster Jewelry earring (right). On Whitney Peak: Area blazer; Nickho Rey earrings; Kenneth Jay Lane ring. On Eli Brown: Emporio Armani blazer; Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello shirt and necklace. On Zión Moreno: Dior dress and bralette; Kenneth Jay Lane ring. On Emily Alyn Lind: Carolina Herrera gown; Jimmy Choo shoes; Shay Jewelry earrings. On Evan Mock: Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello shirt; Bottega Veneta pants; Zoë Chicco necklace; Roberto Coin necklace charm and ring (left); LuvMyJewelry (LMJ) rings (three middle); Tom Wood ring (right). On Savannah Smith: Alessandra Rich top and skirt; Aquazzura heels; Susan Foster Jewelry bracelet and ring (left); Tom Wood ring (right). On Thomas Doherty: Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello shirt; Dior Men long-sleeve shirt; Stone and Strand pearl necklace; Zoë Chicco gold necklace.
On Jordan: Naeem Khan jumpsuit; Cosabella bodysuit; Demarson earrings; Gucci bracelet. On Savannah: Collina Strada bodysuit; Commando bralette; Lizzie Fortunato earrings; Oscar de la Renta twisted bracelet; Lady Grey bangle set. On Tavi: Gucci top and skirt; Kenneth Jay Lane earrings.
On Emily: Germanier sweatshirt; Naeem Khan pants; Roger Vivier bag; Nickho Rey earrings. On Whitney: Dior Men jumpsuit; Oseree bikini; Private Policy cardigan; Luv Aj earrings. On Zión: Prabal Gurung gown; Lizzie Fortunato earrings; Kenneth Jay Lane ring.
On Thomas: Dior Men sweater; Collina Strada sweatpants; Vans shoes; Loren Stewart necklace; Jennifer Fisher ring (left); Lady Grey ring (middle); Faris ring (right). On Evan: Dior Men turtleneck and boots; Real Buy pants; Roberto Coin ring. On Eli: Todd Snyder polo; Dior Men pants; Puma x KidSuper sneakers; Title of Work necklace.
Solo shots: On Thomas: Aknvas jacket; Dior Men shirt; Tom Wood ring.
On Evan: Puma x KidSuper jacket; Lacoste shirt; Real Buy pants; Justine Clenquet necklace.
On Whitney: Rozie Corsets top; Lacoste long-sleeve shirt; Stella McCartney pants; Roger Vivier heels; Rebecca de Ravenel earrings.
On Tavi: Victoria Beckham shirt; Dior Men navy and white shirt; Mother jeans; State Property earrings; Gucci necklace; Stone and Strand ring.
On Jordan: Tory Sport bralette; Rowing Blazers shirt; Puma x KidSuper pants; Fendi bag; Area earrings; Justine Clenquet necklace.
On Emily: Gucci jacket; Area dress; Sapir Bachar necklace and earrings; Hue tights.
On Zión: Stella McCartney dress; Gianvito Rossi heels; Mounser earrings; Gucci bracelet.
On Savannah: Rowing Blazers shirt; Polo Ralph Lauren jeans; Femmes Sans Peur booties; Mark Cross bag; Demarson earrings; Stone and Strand necklace.
On Eli: Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello jacket and necklace; Bode shirt; A.P.C. jeans; LuvMyJewelry (LMJ) ring.
