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Nearly a decade since Gossip Girl ended, stars Chace Crawford and Penn Badgley took a walk down memory lane for Variety‘s Actors on Actors series. While Penn’s character, Dan Humphrey, was a blogger who spent a lot of time online (wink wink), Penn, 33, was totally against technology. Chace, 34, recalled a hilarious story about Dan getting an amazing piece of tech in 2007 that he absolutely rejected.
“Remember, ’07 was when the very first iPhone came out. I remember you got it. I remember you had it at a Halloween party. You had the first iPhone, and think about that now. I remember we were more about camera phones and this and that. There wasn’t social media,” The Boys star said. Penn wasn’t as thrilled about the phone, he said. It was all his onscreen, and real life girlfriend, Blake Lively‘s fault.
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“Blake got me that,” Penn said. “I literally was like, ‘I don’t want this thing. It’s so cumbersome, and it has all these apps on it.’” While their characters dated on and off on Gossip Girl, Penn and Blake had a three year relationship in real life. They dated from 2007 to 2010, and stayed friends. She’s now married to Ryan Reynolds, of course. Penn’s married to Domino Kirke.
The You star said that he also had no idea how to use social media at the time, and was resistant at first. “I remember even meeting a publicist that first season, and she was talking about this thing called Twitter. And as she explained Twitter, I was like, ‘What is this nonsense? I don’t want to have a Twitter account, and you tweet. What is this bird thing?'”
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Both Chace and Penn can’t believe that (SPOILER) Dan turned out to be Gossip Girl, either. “At the end of Gossip Girl the show, whatever your reaction is on whether it was smart to do that or not, that he’s Gossip Girl — it didn’t really line up with the character of Dan. Right?” Chace said, to which Penn agreed. “It’s interesting that regardless of my performance, the fact that it’s simply me, just one of the main characters of the show called Gossip Girl, and I ended up being Gossip Girl,” Penn said.