- Penn Badgley opened up about dating his Gossip Girl costar, Blake Lively, in his early 20s on the most recent episode of the ‘Call Her Daddy’ podcast, which dropped on Wednesday, April 23
- Badgley and Lively played on-screen love interests Dan Humphrey and Serena van der Woodsen on the series, which ran for six seasons
- Badgley said there was “not enough separation” between himself and his character during that time
For Penn Badgley, life imitated art a little too closely during the six years he starred as Dan Humphrey on Gossip Girl.
The 38-year-old actor appeared on all six seasons of the hit drama, which followed a group of wealthy Manhattan teens. After the show started in 2007, when Badgley was 20, he and Blake Lively, who played Serena van der Woodsen, Dan’s sometime love interest on the show, began an off-screen romance.
During an appearance on the Wednesday, April 23 episode of Call Her Daddy, host Alex Cooper asked You star Badgley whether while living in New York City and dating Lively, he felt he could “separate” his job from his life or whether it was “merged.”
“I mean, that’s a great question because it was the struggle,” Badgley shared of the confusing time. “When you do a television show, you’re doing it constantly.”
He added that as his stardom grew, people began linking him to his on-screen character.
“What starts to happen when you’re in this one role for a long time — the aspect of celebrity being a part of it, a huge part of it — there is not enough separation, I think, for anybody,” he explained. “You’re seen as this person, you’re called their name out on the street. You also constantly have to be that person at work.”
Badgley said that in his early 20s, he lacked the “emotional maturity to understand how to differentiate” himself from Dan “in terms of self-worth.”
“What people seemed to think of Dan seemed to be what people thought of me,” he noted.
Prior to dating Lively, Badgley added that he had a long, challenging relationship.
“I also had a very long and difficult relationship in my teen years,” he said. “That marked me, and I actually remember thinking when I got out of it at 19, I was just like, ‘That was a way to start it all. I wonder what effects it’s gonna have on me,’ you know?”
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Amid his parents’ divorce as he was growing up, Badgley said that he was “starved for many kinds of intimacy,” and craved it in his romantic relationships instead.
“I’ve had a handful of long relationships. And that’s about the extent of it. You know, [I] really did not date,” he shared. “Dating is a bit of a performance, I think… I really longed for that kind of connection, that kind of intimacy.”
He shared that he had “three different long-term relationships” in his 20s, with the third being his wife, Domino Kirke, with whom he is now expecting twins.
“When we first met, it was immediate,” he said of the doula. “And before we had time to think, I think we wanted to be together in the deepest way.”
You returns to Netflix for a fifth and final season on Thursday, April 24
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