Penn Badgley’s character of Dan Humphrey was never supposed to be Gossip Girl

With Gossip Girl reboot kicking off, the show has been making headlines over previously undisclosed secrets about the original drama.

Showrunner and creator of the series, Joshua Safran spoke to the Daily Beast and revealed that Penn Badgley’s character of Dan Humphrey was never supposed to be Gossip Girl according to his original storyline, which got changed after he left the show 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 said.

“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,” he went on to say.

“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,” he added.