Why Penn Badgley Has Mixed Feelings About His <i>Gossip Girl</i> Days

Penn Badgley reached a new level of fame in his early 20s when the child star took on the career-defining role of Dan Humphrey in Gossip Girl. In an interview with The Guardian, he looked back on how his time on the series shaped his life—for better and worse.

Badgley shared that he suffered from body dysmorphia as a kid: “I know that I hated my body and simply wanted a different one.” Entering the acting industry, and then ultimately becoming a beauty standard for others as a teen star, was an eye-opening experience for him.

Blake Lively and Penn Badgley shooting Gossip Girl in New York on Nov. 1, 2010

“There was just a period where, coming out of depression and isolation, I was jumping willfully into, but also being thrust into, this world where the more conventionally beautiful I seemed, the more successful I might be, the more value I might have,” he said. “There’s no way to get past the superficiality of this work, and if you recognize that, you can’t help but recognize the superficiality of our culture, because of the way it rewards this work.”

When asked about Gossip Girl in particular, he was candid in his assessment: “What was that show other than aesthetic? That was its thing, the way we all looked.” As game-changing as the show was for Badgley’s career, he admitted that “I didn’t particularly love the superficial celebrity aspect of the way I was perceived.”

Fame was isolating, he said, calling it “extremely unnatural, just the way that people want to relate to you. It’s not a new idea that fame has all these nefarious dimensions to it. And in order to even appreciate or utilize the privileges that come with it, one has to really grapple with the ways in which it’s completely disabled parts of you or your life, or your relationship to others and society....The privileges and the sacrifices are both extreme and obscene, and so you have to take them both. In order to be a decent person, a good father and a husband, a good friend, a responsible colleague, I’ve been grappling with all the ways in which this stuff is just not a good way for somebody to live.”

Read his full interview here.