It’s been almost 10 years since Gossip Girl ended, but the show continues to fascinate generations. Like many other hit TV shows and movies, Gossip Girl is getting a reboot with an incredible new cast. Filming has already begun in New York City on the infamous MET steps. To fuel fans’ excitement, HBO Max revealed teaser images with every character’s name and a keyword to describe them. The show was originally scheduled to air fall of 2020, but because of COVID-19, the network delayed production. Filming began in October 2020 and will film in New York, Los Angeles and Vancouver.
The new cast includes Emily Alyn Lind, Eli Brown, Whitney Peak, Evan Mock, Zión Moreno, Thomas Doherty, Jordan Alexander, Savannah Lee Smith and Tavi Gevinson. The reboot has no official premiere date yet, but hopefully, the show will air sometime in 2021. The new Gossip Girl will be in the same universe as the original. The TV show logline reads: “Eight years after the original website went dark, a new generation of New York private school teens are introduced to the social surveillance of Gossip Girl. The prestige series will address just how much social media — and the landscape of New York itself — has changed in the intervening years.”
There will also be familiar faces on the production team. Joshua Safran, a writer and executive producer for the original show, is set to come back. Also rejoining the team are Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, reprising their roles as the co-creators and executive producers of the series. Although fans are dying to know what happened to Dan, Serena, Blair, Chuck and Nate, the original cast has yet to confirm a reappearance on the show. The only original cast member coming back is Kristen Bell, the voice of Gossip Girl.
Schwartz said at the Television Critics Association in 2019 that he and his team had contacted all the original cast. “We’ve reached out to all of them to let them know it was happening and we’d love for them to be involved if they want to be involved, but certainly didn’t want to make it contingent upon [them being involved],” Schwartz said. “They played these characters for six years, and if they felt like they were good with that, we want to respect that, but obviously… it would be great to see them again.”
The chances of the original cast making an appearance are slim, but previous interviews they’ve done shows they aren’t totally opposed to the idea. “I could maybe come back and play a father or something. It’d be nice,” Chace Crawford, who played Nate Archibald, said on WWHL in 2019. As for Penn Badgley, who played Dan Humphrey a.k.a. (spoiler alert!) Gossip Girl, said his return would be contingent on a lot of matters. In 2019, he told Entertainment Tonight that he had “not had conversations with any of the creators yet” but a return “would just depend on a lot of things.”
Blake Lively, who played Serena van der Woodsen, shared similar thoughts to Badgley’s. “It sort of all depends,” she told Variety in 2017. “Would I do seven years of the show? No, because it’s hard work and I’ve got my babies, and I don’t want to be away from them that much. But I’ve just learned in life you never say never. I’m looking to do something that I haven’t done yet, not something that I did. But would I do that? Who knows — if it was good, if it made sense. We had so much fun shooting and living and working in New York City.”
While we await the reboot, we will definitely be binging the original series.