This New 'Gossip Girl' Character Has a Connection to Dan Humphrey

Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for Episode 3 of Gossip Girl.

Distractify here, your one and only source into the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite. So who is the newest to join the ranks of Julien, Audrey, and Max? Lola Morgan. That’s right — this new bombshell on the Upper East Side breaks the lives of our Gossip Girl teens wide open — specifically Julien's — since Lola is her dad’s secret girlfriend.

But we’re not here for slander. Lola Morgan seems to make Julien’s dad happy, and we definitely want to see more of her. So who is the mysterious Lola Morgan and why does she look so familiar to us?

In classic Gossip Girl fashion, Lola Morgan makes quite the entrance. Julien believes that Davis is away on a business trip to Berlin, so she goes clubbing to get over her ex-boyfriend’s new romance with her half-sister, Zoya.

While crying in the bathroom, she meets Lola, and the two bond over their messy love lives. And we can’t deny that girls bonding in the bathroom of the club is very relatable.

Lola reveals that she’s been dating her boyfriend for a year, but he refuses to make their relationship public. All of a sudden, Julien’s problems don’t seem so bad… until Lola exits the club bathroom to give her secret boyfriend a kiss, and it’s Julien’s dad!

We learn that Lola is a barista and aspiring musician, so in Julien’s eyes, it’s pretty convenient that her dad just happens to be a music executive.

Julien hates that her dad lies to her and hates this relationship. She comes up with an effortless plot to expose the relationship on her terms and sets up Davis and Lola for embarrassment. In the end, though, she realizes that she does want her dad to be happy, so we’ll likely be seeing much more of Lola Morgan in the show.

In the second Gossip Girl and You crossover, Lola Morgan is played by Elizabeth Lail. Elizabeth is most known for her portrayal as Beck in Netflix’s You, (Penn Badgley’s character's Season 1 love interest). And many of us Gossip Girl aficionados know that Penn Badgley rose to stardom as lonely boy Dan Humphrey, who is later revealed to be the true identity behind Gossip Girl.

So it’s only fitting that the woman who plays his lover and victim gets a new renaissance on the show that made him. Elizabeth also played a recurring role in Once Upon a Time as Princess Anna/Joan, so she’s well-versed in twisted storytelling.

Nowm she’s slated for eight episodes in HBO Max’s first season of Gossip Girl, so we’re pretty confident she’ll add an extra dimension to Julien’s relationship with her father and her half-sister.

New episodes of Gossip Girl drop on HBO Max every Thursday.