Penn Badgley felt ‘the struggle’ to keep personal life separate from work during ‘Gossip Girl’ days

Penn Badgley, who came to fame as one of the stars of Gossip Girl, had a quick answer when he was asked about how, during the show’s 2007 to 2012 run, had he separated his actual self, a young guy living in New York City and dating costar Blake Lively, from his character. His Dan Humphrey was a prep schooler in the same place dating Lively’s character, Serena van der Woodsen.

“I mean that’s a great question, because it was, it was the struggle,” Badgley told host Alex Cooper on Wednesday’s episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast. “There are many differences between film and television. One of them is that when you do a film, you do it once, you know? And you kind of give it your all and then you move on, whether you want to or not, you do. When you do a television show, you’re doing it constantly.”

Badgley went on to say that the world saw him as Dan from the CW series. He dated Lively from the start of the show until 2010.

“What starts to happen when you’re in this one role for a long time, the aspect of celebrity being a part of it, a huge part of it, there is not enough separation, I think, for anybody,” he said. “You’re seen as this person. You’re called their name out on the street. You also constantly have to be that person at work, and I was 20, I was 21, 22, so I didn’t have the emotional maturity to understand how to differentiate myself just in terms of self worth.”

Badgley, who would have been less than two months away from turning 21 when the show premiered, recalled the effect that the show’s popularity had on him.

“Like, what people seemed to think of Dan seemed to be what people thought of me,” he said. “And now I had enough sense, enough intelligence, enough self-worth…like I wasn’t like losing myself, but it bothered me.”

The former heartthrob said he was often asked inane questions during interviews at a time when there weren’t, for example, podcasts or other venues where people engage in deeper conversations with celebrities.

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“You feel like you’re constantly — even though no one may be actually asking you to do this — you feel like you’re constantly needing to prove yourself in some manner; otherwise, what are you doing?” Badgley said. “You suddenly feel the need to perform, and you’re just like, Why can’t I just say something f—ing normal? You know, like, Why can’t I?”

After his role in the teen soap, Badgley moved on most famously to the series You, a thriller about the obsessive and dangerous Joe Goldberg and his many victims. The fifth and final season premieres April 24 on Netflix.

Watch their full conversation above.