Post by SECRET on Sept 30, 2008 9:52:34 GMT -5
OMFG! IT'S THE GOSSIP BOYS!
Penn Badgley (the good boy), Chace Crawford (the cougar bait), and Ed Westwick (the arrogant rake) are ubiquitous on the Web and in the tabloids, and every hot young woman in America wants a piece of them. Maybe their preppy soap opera, Gossip Girl, will propel one or all of them to superstardom. Or maybe not.
Penn Badgley (the good boy), Chace Crawford (the cougar bait), and Ed Westwick (the arrogant rake) are ubiquitous on the Web and in the tabloids, and every hot young woman in America wants a piece of them. Maybe their preppy soap opera, Gossip Girl, will propel one or all of them to superstardom. Or maybe not.
You are on the streets of Manhattan, shooting on location. A dozen paparazzi and a dozen teenage girls come at you, screaming. The paps give you a little room. The girls give you none. They text and Twitter and suddenly there are many more of them. They would surround you, topple you, if it weren't for security. They just want to touch you. Just for a second. Surely this must be what being famous feels like: being in your early twenties and good-looking, making money, and starring in the kind of TV show that makes fans want to consume you. People keep telling you something big is happening. The phrase window of opportunity is in the air. You could be the next George Clooney, joking with wry self-deprecation 20 years from now about your humble beginnings on a teen soap. Until you Google yourself one night and discover that someone has called you the new Spencer Pratt.
This is the joy, and the stab of anxiety, that comes with being one of the three guys on Gossip Girl, the CW's melodrama about very rich, very beautiful, very stylish, very old students at a private high school on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The show's audience is a strange coalition: 14-year-old girls who dress age-inappropriately, 34-year-old women who dress age-inappropriately, gay men, straight guys who are soap-curious, entertainment-media people, and the Gawker/Defamer/TMZ circuit, which must continually manufacture fresh celebrities to stay alive. But together, they've given Gossip Girl the heat and flash and swagger of a smash (if not the ratings—it finished 150th out of 161 prime-time series last season). Even those who've never seen the show now know that Chace Crawford (Nate, the cougar-bedding heartthrob) and Penn Badgley (Dan, the good guy) and Ed Westwick (Chuck, the snake) are famous for something—at least right now. Which means that if you are Chace, Penn, or Ed (from now on we're using first names, since "Crawford, Badgley, and Westwick" sounds like a Boston law firm), you have a problem: How do you play this moment—a moment for which, just as with virtually every scene in the show, you have had no time to rehearse, very little direction, and no information about what comes next?
CHACE
Chace is cheerfully reeling off the indictments against him. "Model turned actor, dime a dozen, eye candy, doesn't know what he's doing ... and Perez Hilton says I have 'gayface.' So on top of everything else, I have to overcome gayface."
At 23, Chace is the oldest of the Gossip boys, and the least professionally experienced, which initially made him "super-nervous." He does not seem super-nervous anymore. Why should he be? There is good-looking (e.g., everyone on Gossip Girl), and then there is the kind of good-looking that makes other men glumly realize that they are one rung lower on the evolutionary ladder than they'd thought. "It's like he was genetically bred to be a teen star," Penn says, with less sarcasm than awe.
The New York teen-girl hive mind, which is pretty much like that of the Borg on Star Trek if it wore a little plaid uniform, knows where Chace is at all times. "Once when we were on location on the Upper East Side," he says, "these girls came up, you know, with the Blair headbands and their skirts hiked up higher than they should be, and I said to them, 'So, are you looking at colleges?' and they said, 'No, we're in seventh grade.' I was like, 'What?! You shouldn't even be watching our show!'"
It's late July, and we're sitting in the Frying Pan, a burger joint on a Hudson River pier that's exactly the kind of low-rent-but-cool eatery that the Gossip guys like. Chace, who jokes that his character's fashion sense is "permanently stuck in sailor," is in off-duty clothes: Diesel jeans, white T-shirt, Pumas, surfer baseball cap. He seems relaxed. He's on home turf. Most of the cast members live in adjacent downtown neighborhoods, and Chace and Ed share an apartment in Chelsea. This has fueled Internet speculation that they are secret lovers, although that seems to be a figment of the collective gaymagination. If you were a closeted TV star, after all, you'd probably come up with a better cover than living with your boyfriend in Manhattan's Pinkberriest zip code. "No, sorry, I've got nothing to educate you about," says Chace, laughing. "What does bromance even mean?" (Ed has denied rumors too, saying they're just friends.) Chace's mom helped him find the apartment, and he recruited Ed as a roommate. "I thought, Let's pool our money and get something good," Chace says. "I didn't even know if the show was going to last."
Chace grew up in the wealthy Dallas suburb of Plano, where he went to a Christian private school that he says was "much more relaxed" than the fictional prep school he now attends. His own adolescence was nothing like Nate's: "I'm pretty sure I wasn't having sex with any cougars." He played sports; he still likes to hit the gym, watch football, maybe even make a bet or two. He has a nice family; his father is a doctor, his mother is a teacher, and his sister, Candice, who studies broadcast journalism, is the current Miss Missouri USA. And despite advertisements to the contrary, the most "mind-blowingly inappropriate" thing he did in high school, apparently, was "an idiotic glass-punching thing" that left him with a scar on one wrist.
Though he started out as a model (perhaps you've seen him shirtless and treasure-trailed for Abercrombie & Fitch), he didn't like the job; being handled and positioned and manipulated makes him feel "like an animal." He's still not crazy about "last looks"—the moment before every take on Gossip Girl when a small battalion of makeup and hair technicians make sure the pretty people all look perfect. After the touch-up's done, "I literally go into the bathroom and wipe off one layer," he says. The show's hi-def, high-sheen look makes the occasional unanticipated zit "a big deal—oh, they turn on the alarms for that. And they get mad if I get sunburned or if I get a haircut."
Chace, whose demeanor is friendly and relaxed, says he loves his job. Good thing, since he, like all the principals, is under contract for another six seasons. "It never really gets frustrating," he says. "Sure, sometimes you just want to have a scene where you're drunk or having fun. I'm hoping for a fall from grace for Nate. Five years from now, I better have murdered someone!"
PENN
Penn has now been in high school for the better part of seven years, and he's over it. This is his fourth prime-time series. He was a high-school student in Do Over in 2002 and in The Mountain in 2004. He briefly advanced to college in The Bedford Diaries in 2006. Now he's been demoted back to high school (at least he's a senior; the Gossip cast will graduate this season, and not a minute too soon). He knows it's funny. "We all look way too old," he says. "But if we looked the right ages, some of the scandalous shit we do on the show would be too much." (Ironically, in real life Penn skipped high school altogether. He took a proficiency exam at 14 and entered Santa Monica College soon after.)
Penn, who's 21, is funny and articulate, if prone to the occasional conversational misfire that makes you want to hand him a rewind button. Example:
Penn on the paparazzi: Sometimes it's like, I wanna walk my dog, and I can't, because there might be photographers.
Me: You have a dog?
Penn: No. Everybody else does, though.
Penn's girlfriend, not incidentally, is Blake Lively, who plays the blonde reformed sinner Serena van der Woodsen (and who, it should be noted, does have a dog). Every public sighting of the couple is documented and snarked upon by webloid culture (PopSugar headline: ARE BLAKE AND PENN CUTE OR ANNOYING?). Penn, who was home-schooled with Blake a decade ago, when both were child actors, calls the relationship "wonderful and also something to grapple with" in terms of mixing work and pleasure. But he won't say more. "You have to draw the line somewhere. I'm fine talking about my family and personal history, because it humanizes you. But I have to save some shit for me."
Penn tells me that "one of the things that's been my bread and butter with all these television shows I've done is that I don't give a shit," that he initially turned down Gossip Girl, doesn't care for learning his lines, thinks his character is too judgmental, and dislikes most theater, TV, movies, contemporary rock ... Please! This is all sounding too world-wearily Brangelina-esque for a 21-year-old. And he knows it. "People who don't know me that well often think I'm a bit of an asshole and take myself too seriously," he says.
What are they missing? I ask him.
"That I don't take anything seriously. And that just because I'm not smiling doesn't mean I'm not happy. Chace is one of the most positive guys I've ever met, and you can see that in the way he walks around. I'm also like that—but you can't see it."
For the record: Penn is not an asshole, just a guy who protects himself with a light veneer of cynicism. Which may be a smart way to cope with the noise around Gossip Girl. He's been here before, he's had people bullshitting him that it's all going to break his way, and this time he's building himself some insulation. He didn't grow up poor, but his parents divorced when he was 12, and there were lean-ish times after he and his mother, who'd worked at Home Depot, left Washington State for California so that he could pursue acting. For him, acting is work—it's how you make sure you can pay for your own car and make your rent. And if you need to shave your chest hair because teenage girls find chest hair on a good guy sexually threatening, you get out the razor. It's a living.
I ask him about the difference between not taking things seriously and doing a half-assed job. "That's a line I make sure to walk carefully now, because I didn't always," he says. "When I'm bored, my voice becomes even more of a monotone than it usually is. I have to check myself sometimes." As the interview goes on, Penn brightens. He talks about his love for writing music and his excitement about shooting next year's horror remake of The Stepfather. "Suddenly I thought, I like taking chances!" he says. "I want to continue to take chances! Okay, now I understand what people are talking about!" Early in our conversation, I'd asked him what he'd like to change about himself in five years. He drew a blank. Now he spontaneously returns to it:Â "I hope in five years," he says, "I no longer look at acting as a job but as a creative passion. That's how I want to be different."
ED
"Penn said he has to shave his chest hair because it's threatening?" Ed leans back, a trio of metal chains nestling in his own not inconsiderable pelt. The 21-year-old Brit stretches, grins, narrows his eyes—a kind of silent purr. "Reeeaallly ... Well, I think Penn's chest hair may be more like a scaahf. It actually comes out of his neck! So maybe that's why he has to cut it. Threatening? I don't know what threatening hair would look like. We'd have to get Penn here to see!"
Ed is having a roaring great time. By day he gets to play the nastiest piece of work in soapdom, and at night there is downtown New York, his for the taking. Ed is a charmer—his off-camera semi-blokey growl of an accent is a knockout special effect that one suspects has gotten him a lot of phone numbers. He corkscrews with comic embarrassment when I ask (at Chace's urging) if he lifted his character's Waspy drawl straight from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. "Ummmm ... a little bit, maybe! I don't know, man, there's a slight thing in Carlton Banks, that kind of über-preppy, that I did pick up on."
The Internet defines you fast and with the fierce severity of fan fiction. To become a star, you implicitly agree to serve as a fictional character in the Web's ongoing, anonymously written reality soap. Penn? Whipped boyfriend! Chace? Closet case! Ed? Hard-drinking party boy! But today, Ed—on time, alert, and pounding back orange juice—is not going to give Gawker any ammo. Ambling around Chelsea's Half King, the restaurant/bar/hangout he's chosen for our interview, chatting with pals, locking eyes with a waitress, twirling his porkpie hat, then setting it back atop his bed-head—he's in his element. "I've never had a problem making friends," he says. "Put me in a bar and I'll make friends straightaway. And I'm at my most impressionable age. I need to meet new people, and soak up everything like a sponge."
When he got Gossip Girl, Ed had a girlfriend. "That created a kind of emotional rock," he says, "which is no longer the case." Now untethered, he spends his evenings out and about. Last fall, he and a buddy got matching tattoos—he pulls his shirt aside to show me HEARTBREAK HOTEL on his left pec, and 21G (21 grams = the title of the cool, depressing indie movie / the putative weight of the human soul) below his left shoulder. I picture annoyed makeup people smearing concealer onto him for the next 15 years, and wonder if he has some impulse-control issues. Ed says no. "My brother has always been like, 'Go do it, and worry about it when you're in jail!'" he says. "But I've never really been that way. If anything, I'm overanalytic."
Ed grew up in a middle-class town 30 miles outside London. His father is a university lecturer and his mother is a psychologist. Approaching the end of school in the U.K., he was miserable. "I don't understand how the government expects a 16-year-old to know what they want to do," he says. "It made me incredibly anxious and upset."
But things happened fast. He was cast in Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering. Then came Gossip Girl. As Chuck, he oscillates between malice and unexpected decency, and rocks the freakiest wardrobe on TV: old-line yachtsman meets naughty schoolboy meets punk peacock. Plus Argyle kneesocks. "Chuck's just this vain kind of metrosexual Manhattan eccentric living in a flash world," Ed says. "He's young, and still figuring out the way he wants the world to see him. Those costumes are my right-hand man." (Off-camera, too: Ed wore a neckerchief to the Teen Choice Awards. Ed has balls.)
If Penn and Chace thirst to explore their characters' dark sides, where does that leave the guy who's already there? "It's not like Chuck is stickin' a knife to a granny's throat," Ed says. "He's just mischievous. In the second season, you will see him do more of the good-guy thing." But could he go the other way? "Chuck Bass is American Psycho!" he says, beaming. He and Chace like to watch American Psycho. Over and over. Which makes sense: What else is American Psycho, with its obsession with psychotic consumerism and moral rot, but Gossip Girl writ large, without the obligatory-for-network-TV "human" dimension?
Still, Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman as role model? Slightly creepy. A week earlier, Ed and his castmates went to the premiere of Bale's film The Dark Knight, and they were the ones who were mobbed. It's fun, and also part of the drill—show up, look good, be photographed, work the press line, hit the after-party. Ed loved the movie. "That's me," he says. "Batman. I am Batman." He leans forward, liking the ring of it. "I am Batman."
"Secret identity?" I ask.
"Oh, yeah," he says.
"So who are you right now?"
He smirks. "Pure Bruce Wayne."
THE SHOW
Here is what you will learn if you visit the Gossip Girl set in Queens: The boys are not joking when they say it's a job. It is a job. It's also a machine. Wrangle them, beautify them, light them, shoot them, shoot them again, make sure you've got it, move on. There are no table reads, no rehearsals, no "What's my motivation?"
On one set, Blake's and Penn's characters are bickering about his new girlfriend or her new boyfriend or whether they can still be friends or something. Blake-as-Serena turns angrily to Penn-as-Dan. "So this is how you want to handle it," she snaps, "using another girl to embarrass me in front of my fans?" Oops. "Did I say fans instead of friends?" she says, laughing. Penn can't help smiling. It escapes nobody: The line between self-dramatizing high-schooler and self-dramatizing teen idol blurs so easily.
A soundstage away, the intense and poised Leighton Meester, the young brunette who plays the calculating Blair Waldorf, is hissing vicious lines at Mädchen Amick, who is playing Nate's cougar, while Ed glowers mysteriously. In the real world, Amick, 37, has the kind of exquisite, symmetrical loveliness that could cause road accidents. In the Gossip Girl universe, however, she is old, an inappropriately ancient predator whom Blair batters with insults like "Aging beauty. Having your last hurrah before the surgeries start?" She takes it well. TV is a bitch.
This summer, while Gossip Girl was hibernating, the ABC Family network rolled out a very afterschool-special-ish, don't-get-pregnant drama called The Secret Life of the American Teenager. The series is more or less awful, but the title is brilliant, and the show's audience has quickly grown to 4 million, plus massive iTunes purchases. Bigger than Gossip Girl. OMFG—and not in a good way.
So this moment, this momentum, is fragile. It takes only five minutes for a show to become so five minutes ago. Nobody knows that better than Gossip Girl's creator, Josh Schwartz, who launched The O.C. at 26, watched the infotainment universe exalt it for a year, and then saw Season 2 succumb to creative missteps and ego inflation. There's no margin for error when much of your audience has ADD. "It was a real education," he says. "The second season is when a show defines its sustainability." So yes, Schwartz will amiably field requests from Chace, Penn, and Ed to explore their characters' unseen depths, and then he and the executive producer, Stephanie Savage, will do what's best for the show. "They'll all have their opportunities," he promises calmly. "But yeah, when you're 21 you just want to play a badass."
So really, nobody should be complaining, or squirming, or asking for more. Right? Keep your eye on the big picture. And the big screen. Be sure to sound humble when you say It just doesn't get any better than this. Even if you secretly hope it does. Try not to think of it as a competition, or of fame and success as a zero-sum game. Even though the world is telling you that's exactly what it is.
"I know. I know," Penn says. "There's no 'Oh, boo-hoo.' The truth is, we all wanted this. We're living amazing lives that so outweigh the negative shit. To do what we do? Sometimes I feel like we're cheating the rest of the world."
