Blake Lively and Leighton Meester Played Friends on 'Gossip Girl' — What Was Their Off-Screen Relationship Like?

As the drama continues to curdle around It Ends With Us, many are revisiting the show that made Blake Lively famous, Gossip Girl. Blake co-starred on that show with a lineup of young actors, including Leighton Meester, who played her best friend on the series.

Now, many are wondering whether Blake and Leighton were actually friends with one another the way their characters were on the show. Here's what we know about whether the two were friends in real life.

Leighton Meester and Blake Lively were co-workers on Gossip Girl, but according to the show's executive producer Joshua Safran, they were not exactly best friends.

“Blake and Leighton were not friends," Joshua said in an interview with Vanity Fair. “They were friendly, but they were not friends like Serena and Blair.” Joshua was quick to add, though, that it's not like the two of them had any bad blood between them.

“Blake is very much in the moment,” he added. “Blake knows what’s happening. You talk to Blake on a very contemporary level, and she would be like, ‘I’m doing this thing tonight. Have you been to this restaurant?'”

Leighton, on the other hand, Joshua described as "very removed and very quiet.”

Joshua added that after she was done filming her scenes, she would "wander the stage," suggesting that Blake's outgoing personality didn't mesh with Leighton's more reserved one.

Although Joshua's account paints a fairly cool picture, some other reporting suggested that the two of them had much stronger negative feelings about one another. In 2008, New York Magazine reported that the two of them "avoided each other like the plague," and that other cast members on the series felt like they had to take sides between the two women.

If that's true, there's no reporting as to what may have caused a rift between the two. What's more likely, albeit less sensational, is that their personalities never really meshed and they were simply cordial to one another at work.

While it's nice to imagine that characters who play friends are actually close with one another, that simply isn't always the case, and some casts become more friendly than others.

Blake and Leighton don't currently follow one another on social media, and there's no evidence that they have spoken or seen each other since Gossip Girl, so it seems fair to say that they weren't friends on the show, and they aren't friends now.

Crucially, that doesn't necessarily mean that anyone did anything wrong.

It's possible that one of them perceived the other in a negative way, but we don't know that for sure. All we know is that they don't appear to have been friends, even though they spent several years making a show together. There's nothing wrong with not being friends with the people you work with, though, or at least not all of them. In some professions, that's considered to be healthy.