‘Gossip Girl’ Showrunner Reveals Who Was Originally Meant to Be Gossip Girl

We all know by now that Penn Badgley‘s character Dan Humphrey was revealed to be the person behind Gossip Girl in the original Gossip Girl series, but we just learned a different character was originally going to be the anonymous blogger.

Joshua Safran, the showrunner and creator of the HBO Max revival series, is opening up about the original plans for Gossip Girl.

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Safran was a writer and producer on the original series, though he left after five seasons.

“I think there would have been holes in anybody being Gossip Girl, and it wasn’t Dan when I left the show [after Season 5], but I also understand why it is Dan. Yes, I agree there are things that don’t line up, but it had to be Dan,” he told The Daily Beast. “I wanted it to be Nate, and it actually makes much more sense when it’s Nate—even when it doesn’t make sense. I mean, it would have been great to never reveal it.”

Safran then revealed that the original plans included having Chace Crawford‘s character Nate become Gossip Girl.

He said, ” It was Nate. It was Nate until the day I left. I think we all came to the conclusion that it might be Nate by the end of Season 4, and then we spent Season 5 teeing it up. If you watch it, there are many clues to it being Nate. But I also think weirdly, in noir fashion, it’s great that we dropped a red herring. But it wasn’t as organic as Dan. With Dan, it makes sense because he wanted to find a way in; but with Nate, it was because he’d never sent anything in to Gossip Girl, and if it had been Nate, it was based on this idea that he’d felt so guilty for sleeping with Serena that he had to create an alter ego to bring us all to it.”

Originally found on Just Jared Read More