Penn Badgley got ‘Gossip Girl’ crew to buzz off his mullet for pilot

Gossip Girl‘s Dan Humphrey might’ve looked a lot different.

“So, the first day, I had just done a rugby movie, like a year prior, and just let the mullet grow out, so my hair was a bit unruly,” actor Penn Badgley said Wednesday on The Jennifer Hudson Show. “And I surprised everybody when I went into the hair and makeup trailer, I convinced the stylist to just buzz it all off, and that was how I started.”

Badgley had earned professional acting credits for close to a decade when he was cast on the CW teen drama in which he starred alongside Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, Chace Crawford, Taylor Momsen, Ed Westwick, and Jessica Szohr. They played a posh set of wealthy teenagers attending high school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, whose lives were chronicled by a catty, anonymous blogger, who signs off every transmission with “XOXO, Gossip Girl.” (Of course, it turned out to be Dan.)

See his conversation with Hudson below.

Badgley’s sports drama Forever Strong, which was released in 2008, was about a rugby player. It costarred Sean Astin, Gary Cole, and Neal McDonough.

It doesn’t loom as large as Gossip Girl does on his list of credits. The show became a sensation and brought fame to its young stars. It was such a success that it was rebooted with a new cast for two seasons in 2021 on HBO Max.

Nearly 18 years after the original series premiered, the subject came up in an interview with Badgley published last week in The Guardian.

“What was that show other than aesthetic? That was its thing, the way we all looked,” Badgley said. “I didn’t particularly love the superficial celebrity aspect of the way I was perceived.”

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He spoke in the same interview about the five seasons that he’s starred on another hit, this one Netflix‘s You. The fifth and final season of the thriller about Badgley’s psychopath Joe Goldberg and his dangerous obsessions premieres April 24.

While filming his final scene, he felt like he couldn’t expel his last lines quickly enough, he told the newspaper. But of course he wouldn’t disclose what happens to the character.

“It was as though I couldn’t sustain the rage any more, couldn’t sustain the levels of artifice with him, just all of it,” Badgley said.