Who is Penn Badgley? A dark-haired boy who goes to a private school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side but lives down to earth in Brooklyn – with his sister and a father who is in a rock band and looks like a model. Penn has surprisingly thick sideburns for his 17 years, and there’s that half-smile, loosely tied school uniform tie, and Normalo shoulder bag with which he invades the world of New York City’s wealth-deprived super-rich. To cut it short: You were in love from the first moment. In the boy who in gossip Girl wore the romantic nickname “Lonely Boy”.. Of course, the actor Penn Bedgley was not called Penn Bedgley in the series, but Dan Humphrey. But for a generation of fans of the 2007 series, Penn Badgley will always be that boy.
In the meantime, however, he is 35, married, father – and also artistically out of the teen heartthrob phase of life. In the Netflix series You – you will love me he’s been playing a creepy stalker since 2018, which should theoretically lead to him, too creeping out of the hearts of millennialsthe long hours of their youth with the six seasons of gossip Girl spent (of course we are not talking about the underground reissue from last year). Practically it didn’t lead to that.
Penn Badgley, the real human, lingers in hearts and is now doing a podcast too. The announcement he is exploring “awkwardness, anxiety, heartbreak, and self-discovery experienced during adolescence” sounded emotional and sad. very after Lonely boy.
Penn Badgley as stalker Joe Goldberg in You.
(Photo: imago/Cinema Publishers Collection)
The now cheerful work is called pod crushed, however, it remains mysterious. Not only does the title give little away, but in the first few episodes, Penn Badgley and his co-hosts Nava Kavelin, a former middle school principal, and Sophie Ansari, a former fifth grade teacher, don’t really explain why Penn like him there means actually doing this podcast. Podcrushed has, at least that much is clear, something to do with the age at which American teenagers enter middle school, i.e. around the 6th to 8th grades. The age when you would actually still like to play with your barbies, but know that it’s not cool anymore. In each episode, Badgley reads from listeners’ middle school experiences. It’s about embarrassing moments between the playground and the school locker, about low self-confidence and falling in love for the first time crush. That’s probably why Podcrushed.
Exactly what qualifies Penn Badgley to be involved in middle school is not entirely clear. If it should be the fact that he himself once crush for middle-school millennials, that would be vain. But maybe just be honest.
His role on the podcast appears to be that of celebrity mobilizer. Because the stories from middle school are followed by interviews with fellow actors like Drew Barrymore. The selection of guests shows that Badgley really has no problem with being committed to his roles. Leighton Meester appears in the very first episode, Blair Waldorf out gossip Girlwho, in a warming conversation, talks about the pitfalls of becoming a woman in her industry past 30: she says she’ll never get a romantic partner of the same age in film and television again, hers love interests must be over 50 today. In one of her most recent productions, she played the mother of ten and twelve-year-old children, and had to resist having her gray hair covered. Now 36, she says she’s actually old enough for the industry to play the mother of Timothée Chalamet, 26.
Penn Badgley and Leighton Meester have sat down again 15 years after this shot from ‘Gossip Girl’ season one, talked about their industry and the toughest time growing up.
(Photo: imago/ZUMA Press)
And what do you learn about Penn Badgley? He was already a child actor before he got through gossip Girl became internationally famous, had his first appearance in a television series at the age of 12, a year later a leading role in the US soap opera, which has been running since 1973 The Young and the Restless. At 14 he dropped out of school, middle school to be exact, to pursue a career in Hollywood. With roles in film and television, he soon became the breadwinner for his family, having his attractiveness evaluated by adult film producers and often bickering with his mother. He’s a great conversationalist about this with Drew Barrymore, who had a similar experience after moving to ET. had played along. As a podcast host, Badgley doesn’t yet come across as casual, but his well-chosen guests still make for good moments of conversation.
With Leighton Meester, of course, he comes back to the common past gossip Girl to speak. The series, says Badgley, is a good example of how you can dramaturgically make something out of nothing. The plot of gossip Girl can actually be summarized as he does it: misunderstandings via SMS between 16 and 17 year olds.
gossip Girl, that series that was wonderful and horrible, and that couldn’t exist today because it contained so many questionable messages. The series, to which many young people owe the idea that their lives should consist of intrigue and superficiality, not to mention the illusion that they themselves could one day appear in a Vera Wang dress at a debutante ball or their parents’ charity event – and that would be the high point of her youth.
And the series, you learn that in Podcrushed, has also made famous at least two actors, Penn Badgley and Leighton Meester, who took part in the craziest hype about their characters early in their careers and seem to have weathered it reasonably well. So until the next project: You know you love me, xoxo.
Podcrushedavailable on all podcast platforms, new episodes every Wednesday.