Nearly 15 years after he and Blake Lively broke up, Penn Badgley makes a rare comment about the relationship.
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While appearing on the Call Her Daddy podcast this week, Badgley spoke about the struggles he dealt with while dating his Gossip Girl co-star and separating real life from the show.
“I mean, that’s a great question because it was the struggle,” the actor said. “When you do a television show, you’re doing it constantly.”
He then shared that as his popularity grew, fans began to link him to his on-screen character, Dan Humphrey. “What starts to happen when you’re in this one role for a long time – the aspects of celebrity being a part of it, a huge part of it – there is not enough separation, I think, for anybody.”
He further stated, “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.”
Badgley also pointed out that during his early 20s, he lacked the “emotional maturity to understand how to “differentiate” himself from the Gossip Girl character “in terms of self-worth.”
“What people seemed to think of Dan seemed to be what people thought of me,” he said.
Penn Badgley Also Spoke About the Relationship He Had Before Dating Blake Lively
Meanwhile, Penn Badgley spoke about the relationship before he dated Blake Lively. He described it as a “long, challenging relationship.”
“I also had a very long and difficult relationship in my teen years,” he said. “That marked me, and I actually remember thinking when I got out of it at 19, I was like, ‘That was a way to start it all. I wonder what effects it’s gonna have on me,’ you know?”
He said he starved for many kinds of intimacy in relationships as well. “I’ve had a handful of long relationships. And that’s about the extent of it. You know, [I] really did not date. Dating is a bit of a performance, I think… I really longed for that kind of connection, that kind of intimacy.”
Badgley and Lively dated from 2007 to 2010. She went on to date and marry her husband, Ryan Reynolds. Badgley married Domino Kirke. The couple is now expecting twins.