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‘You’ Don’t Know Penn Badgley: Surviving ‘Gossip Girl,’ Staying Sober With Blake Lively and Finding Himself in a Sexy Serial Killer
Penn Badgley doesn’t actually need to be on the internet to stoke his popularity. He’s already the internet’s boyfriend, and has been since the original “Gossip Girl” premiered in 2007. Badgley became famous at the exact moment when the celebrity-industrial complex, fed by the toxic brew of the gossip sites TMZ and Perez Hilton, was at its most pernicious — which was the same moment that teenagers everywhere got their hands on their first iPhones. “‘Gossip Girl,’ if you think about it, wouldn’t have happened at any other time,” Badgley says. “That was the spirit of the show: It was Perez. It was TMZ.” Badgley made it through that poisonous period intact. But now, when it comes to joining social media platforms, he is, understandably, apprehensive. Twitter used to suit Badgley best, he being a news-obsessed man of words, but that’s changed: “I can’t really spend much time on that platform anymore,” he says. Instagram, too, feels “a bit too much like standing on a stage and trying to present,” and Badgley doesn’t need that type of exposure.
