Opening up on ‘Call Her Daddy,’ Penn Badgley shares how his off-screen romance with Blake Lively blurred with their on-screen personas and impacted his early years of fame.
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Penn Badgley is revisiting a major chapter of his early fame — his relationship with Blake Lively.
The Gossip Girl alum, now a father of a 4-year-old son and expecting twins with wife Domino Kirke, recently opened up about how closely intertwined his real-life romance with Lively was with their on-screen characters, Dan and Serena.
Speaking on the April 23 episode of Call Her Daddy, Penn described the experience as “the struggle,” explaining how working nonstop on the series blurred personal and professional lines.
“When you do a television show, you’re doing it constantly. You feel like you’re constantly needing to prove yourself in some manner,” Penn shared. “There is not enough separation. You’re seen as this person — you’re called their name on the street. I was only 20 or 21; I didn’t have the emotional maturity to separate my self-worth from my character.”
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Penn admitted that the public perception of Dan Humphrey became deeply entangled with how people perceived him personally.
Luckily, despite their breakup in 2010 — two years before Gossip Girl ended — Penn and Blake maintained a professional, drama-free dynamic on set.
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“I’m pretty sure we were exes for nearly half of the run of the series,” he said previously on his podcast Podcrushed. “We had to do all kinds of nutso stuff — even a fake marriage — but in my memory, there wasn’t one bit of strangeness. It wasn’t a thing.”
Since Gossip Girl, both actors have moved on to thriving careers and personal lives. Penn has earned acclaim for his role as Joe Goldberg in Netflix’s You and married Domino Kirke in 2017. Blake, meanwhile, has starred in films like A Simple Favor and The Age of Adaline, and is happily married to Ryan Reynolds, with whom she shares four children.
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