Blake Lively’s Biggest Controversies Amid ‘It’s Over With Us’ Drama

Lively and her Gossip Girl co-star Leighton Meester reportedly “avoided each other like the plague” during filming.

While their “Gossip Girl” characters went from best BFFs to toxic friends almost every episode, off-screen Lively and Meester were said to have had a frosty relationship.

The CW teen drama ran for six seasons between 2007 and 2012. Lively played the effortless, free-spirited Serena Van der Woodson, the foil to Meester’s controlling queen Blair Waldorf.

New York magazine reported in 2008 that the two stars were said to be “avoiding each other like the plague” while filming the show’s early seasons, with tensions running so high that their cast mates were forced to ” choose the side”.

Three years later, in 2011, Hollywood Life reported that Lively had a problem with Meester’s costume budget for the show. The outlet quoted an anonymous source as saying that Lively was “very upset about the wardrobe situation” because she had “the most success outside of performing in feature films” and felt it was “done behind her back”.

A publicist for Live previously said: “Blake and Leighton have never been best friends and have never stated that they are. Blake goes to work, does her job and goes home,” Harper’s Bazaar reported in 2017, citing entertainment publication Wetpaint.

Speaking to Vanity Fair for a retrospective of the series published in 2017, showrunner Joshua Safran said the pair got along well on set.

“Blake and Leighton weren’t friends. They were friendly, but they weren’t friends like Serena and Blair,” he said. “However, the second they were on set together, it was like.”

In the same article, recurring actor Michelle Trachtenberg denied rumors of a full-blown feud between the two.

“That’s funny,” she said. “Because when we were filming it was, ‘Leighton hates Blake, Blake hates Leighton, everybody hates Blake, everybody hates Leighton, everybody hates Chace,’ and blah blah blah . It really wasn’t. We were all cold. It was cool.”

Incidentally, since 2024, Lively and Meester are not following each other on Instagram. However, Meester follows the other two of her co-stars, Chace Crawford and Penn Badgley.