Joshua Safran, creator of the upcoming Gossip Girl reboot, revealed that Nate Archibald was originally supposed to be Gossip Girl. Safran was a writer and executive producer on the original Gossip Girl series, which ran for six seasons from 2007 to 2012. The show, based on a series of novels of the same name by Cecily von Ziegesar, followed the scandalous lives of Manhattan's elite through the lens of the mysterious blogger Gossip Girl. The main characters in the original Gossip Girl series were Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester), Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick), Nate Archibald (Chace Crawford), Serena Van Der Woodsen (Blake Lively) and Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley.)
Nate was Dan's polar opposite in many ways. Dan was poor by Upper East Side standards while Nate was born into wealth and privilege, serving as the prince to Dan's pauper. Both Dan and Nate spent the series trying to forge their own identities outside of the roles they were born into status wise. Nate spent time trying to establish his own career after his father was sent to prison and even had a whole arc where he tried to find out who Gossip Girl was and take her down. It wasn't until the Gossip Girl series finale, "New York I Love You, XOXO," the the show finally revealed that "Lonely Boy" Dan Humphrey from Brooklyn had been Gossip Girl all along.
Joshua Safran, who is also the showrunner for the Gossip Girl reboot, revealed that plans were quite different when he was working on the original series. In a new interview with The Daily Beast, Safran revealed that Nate Archibald was originally supposed to be Gossip Girl. Read what Safran had to say about the matter below.
"It was Nate. It was Nate until the day I left. I think we all came to the conclusion that it might be Nate by the end of Season 4, and then we spent Season 5 teeing it up. If you watch it, there are many clues to it being Nate. But I also think weirdly, in noir fashion, it’s great that we dropped a red herring. But it wasn’t as organic as Dan. With Dan, it makes sense because he wanted to find a way in; but with Nate, it was because he’d never sent anything in to Gossip Girl, and if it had been Nate, it was based on this idea that he’d felt so guilty for sleeping with Serena that he had to create an alter ego to bring us all to it."
Dan's motivations did make more sense for his character arc leaning towards his secret identity as Gossip Girl. He was still always treated with an air of suspicion as the outsider looking in due to his lower social status by Gossip Girl standards, even after becoming close with Chuck and Nate, and dating Serena and Blair at different times in the series. The characters were understandably mad when they discovered that Dan had been pulling the strings behind Gossip Girl and it still remains a controversial reveal with Gossip Girl fans to this day.As Safran noted, it likely would've been better overall if the show had kept Gossip Girl's identity a secret. Regardless, the original Gossip Girl series continues to be a classic guilty pleasure show nine years after the series finale. The new reboot certainly has big scandalous shoes to fill.
Source: The Daily Beast
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