'Gossip Girl' Reboot on HBO Max: Everything We Know

Calling all Upper East Siders: it's time to grab your plaid quilts and yogurt cups, because HBO Max's "Gossip Girl" reboot has officially been confirmed. The show will be a sequel to the hit teen soap that ran from 2007-2012 and catapulted the cast, including Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, and Penn Badgley, to stardom. No word yet on when the reboot will air, but fans got their first taste of the new show when paparazzi caught the actors filming in Manhattan.

Here's everything we know about the Gossip Girl reboot.

For now, HBO Max has only revealed that the show will head to streaming platforms in 2021. Production was significantly delayed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but it appears that the cast was able to safely begin filming in late fall 2020. Cast member Emily Alyn Lind shared a snap of herself in her hair and makeup trailer on October 26 on her social media."

With the caption "Day 1.

The paparazzi were also able to capture some of the cast in character, gathered on the same Met steps that Serena and Blair made so famous in the later days.

Among those spotted was Emily Alyn Lind, best known for her role as Ariel Braden on CBS' Code Black, who landed the lead role in HBO Max's reboot of Gossip Girl; according to Deadline (opens in new tab), Lind plays Audrey . While Lind's blonde hair is natural for playing Selina 2.0, her character description and name, apparently inspired by Blair Waldorf's favorite movie Breakfast at Tiffany's, seem to suggest that Lind is the reboot's Queen B.

HBO Max also announced several other names joining the cast. Whitney Peake ("The Adventures of Sabrina") and Eli Brown ("Pretty Little Liars/Perfectionists") will join the show's main trio, according to Deadline (opens in new tab), while Jonathan Fernandez ("Lethal Weapon") and Jason Gotye (Broadway's "Evita") will reportedly be part of the core ensemble.

On March 11, HBO Max announced that fashion wunderkind Tavi Gevinson will also join the cast of the reboot as a lead. Gevinson is best known for her style blog, which blossomed into a full-fledged magazine, Rookie, by the time she was 15 years old. No other details about Gevinson's character have been released, but her real-life success in the fashion and media industries at a young age makes her a perfect riff on Jenny from the original show, which had an equally rapid (but destructive) rise in popularity.

Deadline (opens in new tab) also reports that Thomas Doherty, Adam Chanler-Berat, and Zion Moreno will join the cast. Early photos from the shoot also confirm that newcomer and current NYU student Savannah Smith, Canadian singer and actress Jordan Alexander, and model Evan Mock will also join the reboot.

"Like the original series, the new series of 'Gossip Girl,' which will be written by [Joshua] Safran, is based on Cecily von Ziegeser's book," per Deadline (opens in new tab)." Logline: Gossip Girl will focus on teenagers attending a private school in New York City and the social surveillance society. The prestige series addresses how much social media, and the New York landscape itself, has changed in the intervening years.

In early November, it was announced that Carina Evans had been tapped to direct the first two episodes of the reboot (open in new tab).

While details about the script have yet to be revealed, Joshua Safran, one of the show's original writers and exec producers, tweeted about how his script is coming along, really well. He wrote on Twitter in April, "Blair walked so this could run."

And while many of the show's executives promise that the familiar DNA that made "Gossip Girl" beloved, like the students who attend Constance Billard and St. Jude, will remain, the show is also making much needed updates to keep up with 2020.

"We're really seeing how social media has changed," Safran told ET. "When the program first started, people were checking in their location on Foursquare or updating their location on Facebook. It's something they would never do now because they don't want anyone to know where they are. I think that change alone will be really interesting because it changes the meaning of Gossip Girl and the dynamic of how Gossip Girl interacts with kids today."

And in an interview at the November 2019 Vulture Festival (opens in new tab), Safran mentioned efforts to make the show more inclusive and diverse.

"At the beginning of the show, there wasn't a lot of representation," he admitted.

"I think I was the only gay writer for a long time, and even when I went to private school in New York in the '90s, the school didn't necessarily reflect what 'Gossip Girl' was about." So this time around, the main characters are non-white. There is a lot of queer content in this show. It deals very much with the way the world looks today, where wealth and privilege come from, and how we deal with it. What I can't say is that there is a twist, and it has everything to do with the twist."

So far, only 10 episodes have been ordered. But given that the original show has been on the air for five years, expect more if fans are as invested in the new generation of private school elites as they are in the OG cast.

Josh Schwartz, who developed the original Gossip Girl series for The CW in 2019 and will return for the reboot with co-creator Stephanie Savage, will be joined by Lively, Meester, Badgley, and a host of other stars including Ed Westwick and Chase Crawford, among other original stars, about the possibility of their return for "GG 2.0." And his remarks were at least hopeful.

"We contacted them all to let them know it was happening, and if we wanted them to be involved, we wanted them to be involved, but certainly didn't want to condition it (their involvement)," Schwartz said at the time (opens in new tab)." They played these characters for six years, and if they felt good about it, we want to honor that, but obviously ... It would be great to see them again."

He also

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He also noted why the reboot of the series will focus on a new class of Upper East Siders rather than following the adult versions of the characters fans have already come to love. He said, "We felt that a grown-up version of the cast, regardless of the difficulty of reassembling those actors, it really didn't make much sense to feel like the kind of adult group that would be patrolled by Gossip Girl."

Many of the original actors have basically said "thanks, but no thanks" to the return, and Lively is still scratching her head about the original series finale (open in new tab), but Gossip Girl's voice and the show's sassy narrator Kristen Bell, will be returning to the show." 'Kristen Bell has always been and always will be the voice of Gossip Girl,' the show's producers said in a statement obtained by The Wrap (opens in new tab) in November 2019."

Whether or not the OG actors return, their characters still have a place on the show. Executive producer Joshua Safran explained to "Entertainment Tonight" (opens in new tab): "The universe still exists. The characters talk about Serena, Blair, Chuck, and Dan."

Fans will also be pleased to hear that the show not only sounds like the original, but has the same glamorous aesthetic, thanks to the return of costume designer Eric Daman." OMGG, I am so thrilled to be a part of the new GG Generation." Daman said in a statement to Teen Vogue (opens in new tab). 'In these times, it's incredible to see the youth of today discovering and falling in love with GG. We are so excited to delight GG fans old and new and to inspire them with the trendiest fashions for this new era. I can't wait, XoXo, E."

Bookmark this page for ongoing updates on the Gossip Girl reboot and the show's original cast involvement.

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