Leighton Meester on life after Gossip Girl: ‘There were six white, rich leads, and now in a post-Trump era, it just looks different’

The star of the adored Noughties high-school drama talks to Amanda Whiting about how much has changed since she played Blair Waldorf, and what it’s like being a thirtysomething in Hollywood

Leighton Meester (Getty Images for Cultural Influence)

Leighton Meester loves Gossip Girl. I would like to make that explicit. She loves it for the life it brought her. She loves it for the career it opened up for her. She loves it for allowing her to play the Upper East Side’s twitchy, scheming teen queen Blair Waldorf, when Meester herself was a twentysomething New York cliché, dazzled by the bright lights of the concrete jungle that dreams are made of. She. Loves. Gossip. Girl. “I wanted a job,” she remembers, “and I wanted that one.”

If you’re inclined to be deterministic about it, you might even say Gossip Girl is the reason Leighton Meester married the man she did – The OC’s Adam Brody – which means the beloved, smutty high-school drama is the reason she has the son and daughter she has now. It’s why she’s sitting in front of a stranger (me) in her sunny Los Angeles home (via Zoom), drinking tea, and answering prying questions about things that happened to her a decade ago.

I belabour this point because modern fandom – which is to say, standom – can be ferociously protective. At various moments, we’ve wanted our stars to be everything from untouchably glamorous (Lauren Bacall! Sophia Loren!) to relatably down-to-earth (Jennifers Garner, Lawrence, and Aniston come to mind). Now, we want them to be grateful. Grateful for the projects that made them actors, the magazine covers that made them stars, for the fans who – 11 years after Gossip Girl wrapped – still faithfully declare their love for “Queen B” on every last Instagram post.

And Meester is so grateful! But, like any 37-year-old grown-up, she’s also reflective about what it was like to be young and only convinced you were already grown up: “That outside world was just so new to me, and when you’re 20, 21, nobody should be writing down what you’re saying. You know what I mean?”

I tell her that I do, though it occurs to me later that I can’t possibly. To have been a Hollywood starlet in the Noughties, before social media cannibalised the tabloids, is to have had a rarefied and time-bound coming-of-age in which the media shaped your story. It’s the difference between seeing the world through selfie mode and trying to navigate it through paparazzi lens flare. What’s your diet secret? At the time, mac and cheese would have been Meester’s honest answer. Favourite workout? “Who asks a 20-year-old that?” Who are you wearing? “I was just like, I don’t know how to answer these questions about fashion,” says Meester. “I didn’t have any money until four days ago.”

But far from being pigeon-holed as a teen tabloid star after GG’s 2007 debut, Meester has steadily worked her way through just about every type of movie Hollywood makes or used to make. She played a beauty queen turned pop-country singer opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in the 2010 musical drama Country Strong (RIP Gwyneth Paltrow movies). The next year she co-starred with Selena Gomez in the frothy Eurotrip romp Monte Carlo (another genre bites the dust) and made a university-set thriller, The Roommate, with Minka Kelly – the era’s other young, beautiful and brunette TV star. There was even a raunchy Adam Sandler comedy, That’s My Boy. (Meester steals every scene as Jamie, a bride-to-be having a secret affair with her own younger brother.) There’s been an action movie (this year’s remake of River Wild), a family drama (The Oranges, with Hugh Laurie and Oliver Platt), and an old-school Harvey Keitel mob movie (2014’s By the Gun).

This month, Leighton Meester completes her Hollywood bingo card with the Amazon Freevee film EXmas, an exes-to-enemies-to-lovers romcom set inside the snow globe of Christmas. Meester plays Ali, an aspiring baker (a classic Christmas TV movie profession) at risk of being alone for the holidays. The plot isn’t exactly relatable – Ali and her former fiancé do battle for the love of his family – but her character’s predicament is. You break up with someone but you don’t want to break up with their whole life, especially not the doting mother or the little sister that had started to feel like your own. It’s satisfyingly cookie-cutter December fare. (Quite literally. There’s a memorably bonkers scene in which Ali gets everyone stoned on cookies baked with THC butter.)

Robbie Amell and Leighton Meester in enemies-to-lovers romcom ‘EXmas’ (Paulina Stevens/Justina Mintz/EXmas Film Inc.)

EXmas means Christmas has come twice for Meester this year; the first, complete with fake frost and carolling, happened in British Columbia in June when the film was shot. Meester was attracted to the idea of playing a straightforwardly romantic role. “I really enjoy those kinds of plots while I’m watching movies: Will they, won’t they?” And she likes Christmas movies, too. But the main reason Meester signed up for EXmas is that she knew it was going to be really fun to make.

The actor looks incredibly laidback for a person embarking on a press tour. She sits in front of haphazard shelves of books and photographs, a ukulele laying on its side, in an LA winter wardrobe staple – a vest top – her bare face framed by piecey bangs. It’s hard to see highly strung Blair, with her shrunken tweed jackets and prim headbands, looking back at me. But when I tell Meester she seems like a relaxed person, she shakes it off at first. “I’m a little sick right now,” she says. “I’m trying to take it easy.”

But it’s more than just appearances. Her answers to my questions, about both the past and the future, are reflective rather than charged. “Like I’ve been through a lot of therapy,” she says, half-joking, before she grows contemplative. “I’m also careful…” she trails off. “It’s a horrible feeling to be misunderstood.”

If you’re in your thirties, you’re generally playing a mom ... The love interests? I’m too old for a man my age on screen

And being misunderstood is something of an occupational hazard for actors. At least at the highest levels, few professions are more public-facing. Before Gossip Girl, Meester, who started acting as a child, bounced from project to project – “never quite knowing if I was going to make it from one to the next but I had this feeling like I was building towards something that’s going to take me away”. She was barely 20 when fame arrived. “And being thrown into that was something that I just didn’t have time to think about. There was not a moment to be like, ‘How do I feel?’”

Given the recent explosion in steamy, drug-fuelled series about teens – Euphoria, Elite, the Gossip Girl reboot – it’s easy to forget how groundbreakingly explicit the OG, GG, was for its time. The series was advertised with incendiary images of its young stars, including Meester and Blake Lively, then 19, in various states of undress, emblazoned with some of TV critics’ most eye-catching warnings about the show. “Every parents’ nightmare.” “Mind-blowingly inappropriate.” “A nasty piece of work.” At the time, Meester was happy to be on the job consistently, every day, for six years. “Looking back, I’m like, did I even understand the implications of the actual content or the context of the show?”

Because, when Meester was running around uptown sets, she was basically still a kid, even if she suddenly had an adult’s job and was earning an adult’s paycheck. As an actual adult, though, she has a different perspective on Gossip Girl, on that incestuous Sandler movie, on basically every entry on her IMDb page. “I’m just saying about literally any movie I ever made, would I go back and be like, ‘Well, through the lens of my adult more developed mind as a mother [with a] post-feminist awakening, would I be OK with that stuff?’ And a large portion, I would have had more thoughts about it. But I also think that again, as a 20-year-old — early twenties, late twenties, whatever age you are really — there’s no ‘perfect’.”

And maybe that’s OK, especially in showbiz, where waiting around for the perfect gig could mean unemployment. “Taking a job is something that I don’t think that I or anybody should be scrutinising too much,” says Meester. “It’s like, well, this is the right job at the right moment, and this is good for me now.” Even slam-dunk choices, like taking on the part of Blair Waldorf, can look different with age. “And by the way, of course, if it’s a question of morality or culture shifting, that has definitely happened since Gossip Girl. I mean, you had a show with six white, rich leads, and now in a post-Trump era, it just looks different.”

Blake Lively, Leighton Meester and Amanda Setton in ‘Gossip Girl’ in 2007 (Cw Network/Kobal/Shutterstock)

Ultimately, she says the pandemonium surrounding the show – the trashy headlines about which Gossip Girl, Leighton vs Blake, “looked hotter” or won the “fashion face-off”, the screaming fans and camera flashes – “made me go inward”. These days, you’re unlikely to see an article written about Meester, or her husband Brody, that fails to mention how “private” the actors are, though it’s not a word she personally associates with. “I’ve never said that,” she says. “I don’t feel that I’m private because I live most of my life not privately. I walk out my front door every day. I live normally and I’m grateful for that. That’s a good thing.” On Instagram, she posts sporadically, usually in support of her projects or Brody’s, or the causes she supports: Democratic politics and Feeding America, a charity that works towards ending hunger. (Even a recent-ish post of Meester distributing underpants at an LA women’s shelter was met with comments of “i love youuu blair”.)

At 37 Meester must find it strange to be constantly associated with a role she finished playing 11 years ago. How is she feeling about getting older in Hollywood? “If you’re in your thirties, you’re generally playing a mom. I think it’s getting better. I think it’s improving. But yeah, I mean, don’t get me started. The love interests? I’m too old for a man my age on screen.”

As for her real-life relationship, she and Brody were first fleetingly introduced by GG and The OC exec producer Josh Schwartz at LA’s iconic Canter’s Deli in 2007, but didn’t really get to know each other until 2011, when they co-starred in The Oranges. In a tale as old as Hollywood age-gap casting, Meester played Hugh Laurie’s girlfriend while Brody, seven years her senior, played his son.

Noughties power-couple Brody and Meester in 2022 (Getty Images)

So what is it like to be half of a Noughties power-couple? “I mean, as you can probably imagine, it’s not something that comes up a lot in the home,” she says, laughing generously at my ridiculous question. But she’s also thoughtful about it, maybe because we’ve spent so much of the last hour talking about the past. I met my husband at university; it’s our shared starting context. It’s not so different from Brody and Meester meeting on the pages of Us Weekly, where they – like it or not – grew up. “I think that is definitely a big piece of something that if we go there and we talk about it, it’s good. We can relate.”

Like most parents of young kids, though, they’re in the present, figuring out how to make Christmas special and how to get home from work for bedtime. “If you give them all you never had, you risk spoiling them,” she says. “And if you can’t give them all that would make a Christmas season magical or just family traditions or whatever, you would feel guilty then, too.”

Looking to the year ahead, Meester would like to do more theatre and she loves doing comedy, such as her 2018 sitcom Single Parents. “I have dream projects and dream characters, but really, I like the way things are going,” Meester says. “I like taking one project at a time.”

‘EXmas’ is out now on Prime Video