Penn Badgley Revealed How His Relationship with Blake Lively “Saved” Him

The actor has additionally shared how much of a non-issue it was to paintings with Blake on ‘Gossip Girl’ after their breakup.

By Dan Clarendon

Mar. Five 2024, Published 5:59 p.m. ET

Source: Getty Images

Former co-stars Penn Badgley and Blake Lively didn’t have an extended relationship, but it sounds love it was an impactful one. In a recent interview, Penn mentioned that Blake “stored” him all the way through a depressing time in his existence.

The actor’s Gossip Girl era was “a laugh and fast paced,” however he additionally skilled a “dark undercurrent” that bottomed out in his overdue 20s, he instructed Variety for a February 2023 profile. And it used to be Blake, a costar on the CW youngster drama, who saved him from suffering with substances, he mentioned. “Blake didn’t drink, and I feel our relationship in many ways stored me from forcing myself to move down that road,” he added.

Here’s what we find out about Blake and Penn’s romance and next operating relationship.

Blake Lively and Penn Badgley reportedly started relationship in 2007.

Blake and Penn reportedly started relationship in 2007, in keeping with E! News, but in a January 2008 interview with People, Blake looked as if it would disregard the relationship rumors about the duo.

“Everybody all the time tries to dig into your individual existence or create things that aren’t there. … It’s foolish,” she advised the magazine. “Any male buddy is obviously a ‘romance alert’ [for the media], however I’ve at all times been pals with boys my entire lifestyles.”

Source: Getty Images

Blake, then 20, additionally addressed the tabloid fixation on her lifestyles off display screen. “[I] just check out not to listen to what folks say,” she mentioned on the time. “At least for me it’s vital — as a result of I’m so shut with my circle of relatives and my friends — to keep core other folks around me that know the truth about the whole lot.”

If the couple had been looking to pose as just buddies, their duvet was blown in May 2008 when People ran paparazzi pictures of the two of them kissing while on holiday in Mexico.

The couple had cut up up by means of the end of 2010.

In October 2010, a rep for both Blake and Penn confirmed to People that the pair had gone their separate tactics.

But if Gossip Girl executive manufacturer Joshua Safran’s timeline is right kind, Blake and Penn navigated that breakup — or perhaps another one — before the end of the CW drama’s second season in May 2009.

“I came upon on the set of the Season 2 finale that Blake and Penn had broken up months earlier than,” Joshua told Vanity Fair in 2017. “They saved the breakup hidden from the team, which you must by no means do now. I don’t even know how they did it. They kept it from everybody, which is a testament to how just right they're as actors. Because they did not need their non-public drama to narrate to the display.”

They endured to movie ‘Gossip Girl,’ and Penn stated there “was not one little bit of strangeness.”

In a September 2023 episode of his Podcrushed podcast, Penn mentioned his and Blake’s post-breakup work on Gossip Girl. “From my memory, I’m lovely positive we had been exes for just about part of the run of all the sequence,” he stated, consistent with E! News. “[The display] lasted for nearly six years, and I don’t assume we have been together longer than two? Something like that.”

But Penn didn’t recall awkwardness on set — whilst his persona, Dan Humphrey, dated and even married Blake’s alter-ego, Serena van der Woodsen. “We had been always very skilled,” he stated. “We needed to do all kinds of nutso stuff. Having a pretend marriage by the top of it … I don’t even suppose, in my reminiscence, there was once now not one bit of strangeness. It wasn’t even a thing.”

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