HBO’s ‘Gossip Girl’ Reboot In “Early Casting Conversations”
Published on January 16, 2020.The early production stages of HBO’s Gossip Girl reboot are in progress!
Last summer, HBO Max announced that they are working on a 10-episode reboot of the popular teen drama for the upcoming streaming service, and more details about the revival are being revealed.
“We have gotten the first script and I think we all breathed a big sigh of relief because it’s quite good,” HBO Max’s Head of Original Content Sarah Aubrey told press at the Television Critics Association winter press tour on Wednesday, January 15. “You can imagine the bar is very high. I think that one of the benefits of having the original creators involved, they’re very clear of what the essential elements of the show are and are not. And also, really excited to bring a modern lens to it 10 years later. Josh and team have done a great job so far.”
When asked about whether or not the original cast – Penn Badgley, Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, Chace Crawford and Ed Westwick – would be involved, Audrey responded, “We’re having early casting conversations, drawing circles around a few people, but it’s early days.” So far, the only member to be asked to return is Kristen Bell, the show’s narrator and Gossip Girl’s voice.
Although it remains unknown if any of the former Gossip Girl cast will return for the reboot, Badgley, recently said to Entertainment Tonight that if he were approached to reprise his role as Dan Humphrey, it would be something for him to “think about.”
“Could Dan Humphrey… ? I don’t… That’s a message I gotta put at the top of my inbox, you know, to think about,” the 33-year-old actor said.
He added, “I think it’s pretty clear that, like, I’ve never been a proponent of Dan Humphrey’s. I’ve never been necessarily the greatest friend or fan of Dan Humphrey, which now I reconcile in this way that I’m like, you know, I would love to contribute in a meaningful way to it. And I guess it would just depend on a lot of things.”
“It would depend on how and why he’s there and I don’t know,” Badgley said.
Meester, who starred as Blair Waldorf in the show’s original run, expressed her opinion in 2018 when asked if she would be interested in returning as Blair in the reboot.
“A lot of the questions that come from it are: ‘Do you miss it?’ ‘Did you love what you wore?’ And I understand that, but — and I say this with nothing but love — it is like saying, ‘High school was an amazing time for you, do you wish you could go back?’” the 33-year-old actress told PorterEdit at the time. “And the truth is, it was so special and such a unique, amazing experience, but no, I wouldn’t wanna go back to it, I was a kid!”
Showrunners of the original 2007-2012 run, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, will return again to helm the HBO Max project.
Last November, writer and producer Joshua Safran revealed that Gossip Girl reboot would feature a more diverse cast and more “queer content.”
“There was not a lot of representation the first time around on the show,” Safran said at VultureFest at the time. “I was the only gay writer I think the entire time I was there.”
“Even when I went to private school in New York in the ’90s, the school didn’t necessarily reflect what was on Gossip Girl. So, this time around the leads are nonwhite. There’s a lot of queer content on this show,” he continued. “It is very much dealing with the way the world looks now, where wealth and privilege come from, and how you handle that. The thing I can’t say is there is a twist, and that all relates to the twist.”