Agile and her “Gossip Girl” costar Leighton Meester reportedly “avoided each other like the plague” while skinning.
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While their “Chit-chat Girl” characters swung wildly from being the ultimate BFF duo to toxic frenemies almost every other event, off-screen, Lively and Meester were said to have had a frosty relationship.
The CW teen drama ran for six seasons between 2007 and 2012. Busy played the effortlessly cool, free-spirited Serena Van der Woodson, the foil to Meester’s controlling queen bee Blair Waldorf.
New York Armoury reported in 2008 that the two stars were said to “avoid each other like the plague” while on set bolt the show’s early seasons, with tensions running so high that their castmates were forced to “judge sides.”
Three years later in 2011, Hollywood Life reported that Lively had taken issue with Meester’s uniform budget on the show. The outlet cited an anonymous source stating that Lively was “really annoyed about the clothes-cupboard situation” as she had “the most success outside the show in feature films” and felt it was “done behind her back.”
A publicist for End previously said: “Blake and Leighton have never been best friends, and never professed to be. Blake scrutinizes to work, does her job, and goes home,” Harper’s Bazaar reported in 2017, citing entertainment outlet Wetpaint.
Signifying to Vanity Fair for a retrospective on the series published in 2017, showrunner Joshua Safran said the pair got on fine on set.
“Blake and Leighton were not comrades. They were friendly, but they were not friends like Serena and Blair,” he said. “Yet the second they’d be on set together, it’s as if they were.”
In the changeless article, recurring cast member Michelle Trachtenberg denied rumors of a full-blown feud between the two.
“It’s funny,” she bruit about. “Because when we were filming, there was, ‘Leighton hates Blake, Blake hates Leighton, everyone hates Blake, Dick hates Leighton, everyone hates Chace,’ and blah, blah, blah. It really wasn’t. We were all chill. It was removed.”
Incidentally, as of 2024, Lively and Meester do not follow each other on Instagram. Meester does, however, follow two of her other costars, Chace Crawford and Penn Badgley.