Blake Lively almost turned down Gossip Girl to go to college.
"I said, 'No, I want to go to college. Thank you, though,'" she told Vanity Fair. "Then they said, 'O.K., you can go to Columbia [University] one day a week. After the first year [of the show], it'll quiet down. Your life will go back to normal and you can start going to school. We can't put it in writing, but we promise you can go.' So that's why I said, 'O.K. You know what? I'll do this.'" As you might imagine, the show never quieted down, so Lively never enrolled.
3. Lively was worried about her real-life relationship with Penn Badgley?until she came to a realization.
"I remember there was one point where we were just afraid of how our personal lives overlapping our work life could be perceived by our bosses," Lively told the magazine. "[But then] we were like, 'Oh no, that's exactly what they want.' They wanted us all to date. They wanted us all to wear the same clothes that we're wearing on the show. They wanted that, because then it fed their whole narrative. People could buy into this world."
4. Lively and Badgley successfully hid their breakup from the producers and crew.
"The shocking thing was, I found out on the set of the Season 2 finale that Blake and Penn had broken up months before," executive producer Joshua Safran said. "They kept the breakup hidden from the crew, which you could never do now. I don't even know how they did it. They kept it from everybody which is a testament to how good they are as actors. Because they did not want their personal drama to relate to the show."
