Greetings, Upper East Siders. Cast your minds back to 2011: a time when the name Blake Lively was entirely synonymous with that of her Gossip Girl character, Serena van der Woodsen, and when the actress was yet to become one half of Hollywood’s most photogenic couple with her Green Lantern co-star Ryan Reynolds. A time when Blake was romantically linked to one Leonardo DiCaprio…
Aside from the obligatory shots of the couple on a Citibike tour of New York and grainy pap photos from a trip to Disneyland, we know very little about this admittedly brief relationship. A new Gossip Girl retrospective published in Vanity Fair to mark the show’s tenth anniversary, however, shines some new light onto the pair, explaining how they’d keep in touch while kept apart by filming commitments. In this case, the truth is almost stranger than Gossip Girl fiction.
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Speaking to the magazine, producer Joshua Safran recalled how Blake would take pictures of a doll on set, then send them to her paramour. A doll. We’ll let him elaborate:
‘When I think about shooting the L.A. episodes, Blake was dating [DiCaprio] at the time, and she had this thing where she had a doll that she took photos of that she sent to Leo,’ Safran told Vanity Fair. ‘Blake was way ahead of the curve. It was pre-Instagram. She was documenting her life in photographs in a way that people were not yet doing,’ he added.
Sadly, Safran provides no further details on the doll in question. Was it a Barbie? An American Girl? A Troll Doll? Could this be the premise for a mid-budget horror film? Presumably, we’ll never know (until Blake is presumably pressed for a follow-up at her next red carpet interview).
In the same interview, the actress alluded to the complexities of taking Serena and Dan’s Gossip Girl romance off-screen. Blake dated co-star Penn Badgley for three years during filming, and told the magazine that the pair had been keen to keep their relationship under the radar for as long as possible, for fear of it becoming a marketing tool for the show.
‘I remember there was one point where we were just afraid of how our personal lives overlapping our work life could be perceived by our bosses,’ she explained. ‘[But then] we were like, “Oh no, that’s exactly what they want.” They wanted us all to date. They wanted us all to wear the same clothes that we’re wearing on the show. They wanted that, because then it fed their whole narrative. People could buy into this world.’
Such was the blurring between Gossip Girl and real life, Blake added, that if she and her then-boyfriend were ‘photographed walking down the street, they didn’t know if it was a paparazzi shot or if it was a shot from the show.’
When they split up in 2010, the pair kept their break-up a secret from crew and even close cast members. Producer Safran explained: ‘They kept the breakup hidden from the crew, which you could never do now. I don’t even know how they did it. They kept it from everybody, which is a testament to how good they are as actors. Because they did not want their personal drama to relate to the show.’
S and Lonely Boy: professional to the last.
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