Penn Badgley opens up on being confused with 'Gossip Girl' character Dan

Penn Badgley is reflecting on how his identity was mingled with his Gossip Girl character while he played Dan Humphrey on the show.

During his appearance on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast, the host asked, “You’re in your early 20s, and I feel like a lot of the character that you were being, you kind of had parallels. You were, like, living in New York City.”

She continued, “You were dating Blake Lively, you were dating Serena on the show. Did you feel like you were able to separate your actual job from your reality and actually able to grow in your 20s or did it all feel like it was kind of merged?”

The You star, who played Dan from 2007 to 2012 and dated Lively from 2007 to 2010, noted that it was a “great question.”

“What starts to happen when you’re in this one role for a long time, the aspect of celebrity being a huge part of it, there is not enough separation for anybody. You’re seen as this person, you’re called their name out on the street. You also constantly have to be that person at work,” he explained.

He reflected and noted that in his 20s, he “didn’t have the emotional maturity to understand” or “differentiate” his identity from his character’s.

“What people seemed to think of Dan seemed to be what people thought of me,” he shared. “I wasn’t losing myself, but it bothered me.”

Penn Badgley has been playing psychopath and serial killer Joe Goldberg in Netflix’s hit show You since 2018.