Top 5 Surprising Facts About Gossip Girl

Hey, Upper East Siders. There’s nothing we like more than a deliciously surprising fact, and today we’re having a special: Five for the price of one. XOXO—Gossip Girl. Welcome to MsMojo, and today we’re counting down the "Top 5 Most Surprising Facts About Gossip Girl" that you probably didn’t know.

Spotted: Legions of fans pining after their beloved series now that it has come to a conclusion. Well, good news for the heartbroken: The fun doesn’t necessarily need to end. Think of this as a one-night stand with an ex that you won’t have to keep as your next dirty little secret. It seems Christmas comes in January for Gossip Girl fans, because once a year, you can relive all you favorite memories with S, Queen B, Lonely boy, and the gang. Thanks to self-proclaimed “casual fan”—as if—then-Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, January 26th is Gossip Girl Day in NYC, an excuse to celebrate everything that made this series what New York Magazine called “The Greatest Teen Drama of All Time.”

It’s a fact: No one does scandalous and sexy quite like the students of Constance Billard and Saint Jude’s. But what would the formative years of Serena, Blair, Chuck, and Nate have looked like without the outsider perspective of our sulking heartthrob, Lonely Boy himself, Dan Humphrey? Game of Thrones might have you believe that no actor is irreplaceable, but we respectfully—scratch that... PASSIONATELY—disagree. Exhibit A—Penn Badgley is Dan Humphrey, and fans should accept no substitute. In a terrifying “what if” nightmare world, Badgley almost turned down the role. In fact, he did turn it down. Twice. After two cancelled TV series, he had decided to move on to other things. Thankfully, producer Stephanie Savage changed his mind.

This just in… whatever Vanessa would have you think, Serena and Dan go back way further than her and Dan. Blake Lively and Penn Badgley certainly had no trouble steaming up the camera lens with their believable on-screen chemistry as Serena van der Woodsen and Dan Humphrey. So it’s not much of a “surprising fact” that they actually dated from 2007 to 2010 during the show’s run. But they actually knew each other long before their respective star-making roles on Gossip Girl—their families were friends, and the two were actually homeschooled together as kids. Here’s hoping their homeschooling experience together was a little less dramatic than their time at Constance Billard and Saint Jude’s.

Spotted in the very first test screening: Lonely Boy typing away at his computer while Gossip Girl herself (voiced by Kristen Bell) narrated. You’re nobody until you’re talked about, but Dan was getting talked about a little too much for the show-runner’s liking… and the audience had way too good of an idea of just who this supposed nobody from Brooklyn actually was—Gossip Girl in the flesh. After the screening to a test audience, the offending scene was cut from the episode for obvious reasons. Penn Badgley himself claims to have not known that Dan was Gossip Girl until he actually filmed the revelatory moment, so the writers clearly upped their subtlety game after having flirted with disaster by nearly ruining the surprise on day one.

Dear young Manhattan elite, how does it feel to have survived a near death experience? Ask any celebrity heiress… there’s no such thing as bad press, just bad publicists. But when it comes to Lindsay Lohan… they have yet to invent a publicist that can spin her story. She is social suicide in its purest form—proof that Lost Weekends should be had in moderation. But when this movie was pitched… it had success written all over it. Lindsay Lohan was THE hottest teen actress after Mean Girls, and no one wrote nuanced teenage girls better than Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of Gilmore Girls, who was set to write the script. Could it have been a hit? Sure. But the Blair Waldorf and Gossip Girl we got is hard to beat.

Do you agree with our list? How will you be celebrating your love of Gossip Girl next January 26th? Did we leave out any deliciously surprising facts you can think of? For more scandalous top 10s and top 5s “that are the talk of the town,” be sure to subscribe to MsMojo.