Adam Brody Says He Assumed Leighton Meester Wasn’t a Good Person After They First Met

Teen-shows-of-our-collective-youths power couple Leighton Meester and Adam Brody are generally pretty low-key. They don’t share much of their family life on social media or in the press, but Brody just spoke about how he fell in love with Meester—and the story is so sweet.

Brody, who rose to fame as Seth Cohen on Fox’s teen soap The O.C., went on Anna Faris’s podcast, Unqualified, and revealed he first met Meester through Josh Schwartz, the man who created both The O.C. and Gossip Girl. (Meester, of course, played Blair Waldorf on the latter show.) 

In 2007, as The O.C. was ending and Gossip Girl was launching on The CW, Brody recalled to Faris (per Harper’s Bazaar), “Literally the first time we met, that whole [Gossip Girl] cast was eating at [Los Angeles deli] Canter’s, and I lived at Canter’s for, like, my entire 20s. And I was leaving, and he introduced all of us.” 

But they didn’t get together right away. They crossed paths a few years later while working on 2011’s The Oranges, where they became friends. However, Brody had a girlfriend. “We did this movie together,” he remembered. “I was seeing someone at the time…. So we met kind of through mutual work friends off and on. And then we didn’t get together [until] about a year after that movie, when I was single.”

Apart from being attracted to her, Brody admitted upon first meeting Meester, “I had no idea whether she was a good person or not. And in fact, kind of assumed she probably wasn’t for, like, the first handful of years that I didn’t know her, just because, I don’t know, Gossip Girl…. Not that I tagged all actresses with that or anything—I didn’t. And I like to date actors. I never believe that stigma.”

Obviously, he was wrong. “Come to find out she’s literally like Joan of Arc,” Brody said. “She is the strongest, best person I know. She is my moral compass and North Star, and I just can’t say enough good things about her character. It’s crazy.”

It goes beyond having good values, Brody revealed to Faris. “She’s never been rude to, like, a single person in her life, except—and I give her credit for this—paparazzi, where I’m too self-conscious,” he said. “I wouldn’t say ‘rude’ but, like, people will try to get her to sign some sexy old photo or something that aren’t fans but they pretend to be fans…. It’s sort of a bottom-feeding thing…. She has no problem being like, ‘You can hate me. I don’t care.’”

Adam Brody and Leighton Meester tied the knot in 2014 and have two children together. Listen to his full chat with Anna Faris here.