The actor talks to ET exclusively about whether he will reprise his character and if he's talked to the producers.
Spotted: Lonely Boy leaving the door open for a Gossip Girl return?
With the popular teen drama getting the reboot treatment on WarnerMedia's upcoming streaming service, HBO Max, next year and Kristen Bell returning as the narrator, the question had to be asked: Could Penn Badgley return as Dan Humphrey in the upcoming series? ET posed the question to Badgley, who played the bookish, all-knowing gossip king, during an exclusive sit-down interview recently while he was promoting his hit Netflix thriller, You.
"Could Dan Humphrey...? I don't... That's a message I gotta put at the top of my inbox, you know, to think about," Badgley, 33, told ET's Lauren Zima.
While news broke in July that Gossip Girl was coming back with a new generation of Upper East Siders, Badgley revealed that he hasn't discussed returning as Dan with executive producers Josh Schwartz, Stephanie Savage and showrunner Joshua Safran. Yet.
"I have not had conversations with any of the creators yet, but you know...," Badgley said, voice trailing off.
When asked if he was willing to entertain the idea of bringing Dan back to life, the actor was honest with his answer.
"I think it's pretty clear that, like, I've never been a proponent of Dan Humphrey's. I've never been necessarily the greatest friend or fan of Dan Humphrey, which now I reconcile in this way that I'm like, you know, I would love to contribute in a meaningful way to it. And I guess it would just depend on a lot of things,'" Badgley explained.
"It would depend on how and why he's there," he continued, "and I don't know... like, is it even... yeah, I don't know."
While it doesn't appear -- at the moment -- that Badgley, who's gearing up for the holiday release of season two of You on Dec. 26, is racing to sign up to appear in the Gossip Girl reboot, he noted that fans are starting to approach him more about his current character, the murderous Joe Goldberg, than Dan.
"Joe is challenging Dan's legacy, I'll say that, pretty quickly," he said.
Schwartz told reporters at the Television Critics Association summer press tour in August that he reached out to original cast members like Badgley, Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, Chace Crawford and Ed Westwick to inform them of the new Gossip Girl take, and left the door open for potential cameos.
"We've reached out to all of them to let them know it was happening and we'd love for them to be involved if they want to be involved, but certainly didn't want to make it contingent upon [them being involved]," Schwartz said at the time. "They played these characters for six years, and if they felt like they were good with that, we want to respect that, but obviously ... it would be great to see them again."
According to the official logline for the HBO Max reboot, eight years after the original website went dark, a new generation of New York private school teens are introduced to the social surveillance of Gossip Girl. The prestige series will address just how much social media -- and the landscape of New York itself -- has changed in the intervening years.
The Gossip Girl reboot premieres in 2020 on HBO Max.
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