Given the sheer number of times that we’ve watched and re-watched every single episode of Gossip GirlGossip Girl (thank you, Netflix, thank you again), it’s pretty hard to imagine our favourite gang of irritatingly photogenic and ridiculously over-privileged New Yorkers played by anyone else – to the extent that whenever we see Blake Lively on screen, we still imagine that she’s playing Serena van der Woodsen. Sorry, Blake.
However, the Upper East Side squad could have been very different indeed. In an interview with Marie Claire back in 2014, actress Lily Collins disclosed that she auditioned for a key role in the US teen drama – but it’s taken until now for her to tell us exactly which role she was going for, revealing to US GlamourGlamour that she could have played… Drum roll please… none other than Jenny ‘Little J’ Humphrey.
‘I remember the screen test for Gossip Girl was on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank,’ Collins said of the experience, which marked her first ever studio screen test. ‘I was about 17 or 18 years old at the time. I remember driving onto the lot and going “Oh my God. This is surreal” […] Whether or not I got it, I knew I could say I screen tested on the lot and one day I want to work at one of these [studios.]’
‘I wanted it so badly,’ she said of the role, which eventually ended up going to Taylor Momsen.
While we never got to see Lily wearing more kohl eyeliner than an early ‘00s Avril Lavigne and going off-the-rails, Little J style, the actress maintains that ‘everything happens for a reason.’ Her first knockback clearly hasn’t set her back – Lily has since gone on to star in films like The Blind Side (playing Sandra Bullock’s daughter, no less), Mirror Mirror and Brit rom-com Love, Rosie. Most recently, she’s taken the lead role in Amazon’s pilot for The Last Tycoon, an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final, unfinished novel.
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