Hey, Upper East Siders! It looks like Lonely Boy hasn't gotten around to watching the Gossip Girl reboot.
Penn Badgley explained why he hasn't tuned into the HBO Max series during a recent interview with InStyle. "With a one-year-old and a 12-year-old and dogs and work, my wife and I," the 34-year-old actor shared, "we've still not finished Ted Lasso."
Badgley wed singer Domino Kirke in 2017. They welcomed their first child together in 2020. Kirke also has a son from her previous relationship with musician Morgan O'Kane.
For the past three years, Badgley has been busy playing bibliophile serial killer Joe Goldberg in Netflix's You. But to some, he'll always be Dan Humphrey from the original Gossip Girl. The star portrayed the Brooklyn-based writer—who had an on-again, off-again romance with Blake Lively's character Serena van der Woodsen—from 2007 to 2012, shocking fans in the finale by revealing he was the one behind the anonymous blogging site all along.
Badgley was asked about the You casting decision and viewers having the opportunity to see a different side of his acting during 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."
Badgley went on to say there was "just something unique" about him having played Dan before taking on the role of Joe.
"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."
And even though there's only an 11-year window from when he first played Dan to when he first played Joe, Badgley suggested the "zeitgeist" is different. As he put it, "Now, we're that much more accustomed to watching a show about a murderer and being like, ‘Woo, I love that guy!'"
You season three hits Netflix Oct. 15.