Penn Badgley said his relationship with Blake Lively ‘saved’ him from a dark road

Penn Badgley went from zero to 100 in the fame department after Gossip Girl first premiered in the mid-aughts. Obviously, this was only heightened after tabloids caught wind of his relationship with his then costar Blake Lively. Stressful as this period was, Badgley said that dating Lively may have saved him from going down a destructive path. 

Plenty of young stars from this era have been open about dealing with substance abuse (Daniel Radcliffe, Demi Lovato, Hayden Panettiere, etc.), but Badgley said in an interview with Variety that he never really did. And he gives Lively some credit for that. “To be honest, I never struggled with substance,” the You actor said. “Blake didn’t drink, and I think our relationship in some ways saved me from forcing myself to go down that road.”

Badgley isn’t completely inexperienced when it comes to drugs. In a 2020 Variety “Actors on Actors” interview, his former Gossip Girl costar Chace Crawford asked if he’d researched LSD to prepare for a scene in You in which his character, Joe, takes the hallucinogenic drug. “In my early 20s, I did plenty of research,” Badgley quipped in reply.

But instead of leaning into drug use when dealing with a dark period, he told Variety, he tried traveling, Buddhism, and, “a lot of physical techniques, from breathing to meditation.” Eventually, Penn Badgley said in the article, he found the Baha’i faith. “I thought to myself, ‘If I really want to participate in the betterment of the world, I think that I should become a Baha’i.’”

When asked if there was any improv around the drug use scenes, he replied: “Going on to say I think actually where I improv the most, ironically, is in the voiceover booth. I’ve developed a trust with the co-creators Greg Berlanti and Sera Gamble. They really trust me to go in there.”

Who knew the troublemaking teens on Gossip Girl were so responsible in real life?

Article originally appeared in GLAMOUR US.