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.

The storylines will be fresh, but not unfamiliar. We don’t have a lot of information right now, but everything we’ve heard sounds very promising. “We have gotten the first script [by showrunner Safran], and I can tell you we all breathed a big sigh of relief because it’s quite good,” Aubrey said on January 15, 2020, at the TCAs, according to Entertainment Tonight. “You can imagine the bar is very high. I think that one of the benefits of having the original creators involved, they’re very clear of what the essential elements of the show are and are not. And also, really excited to bring a modern lens to it 10 years later. Josh and team have done a great job so far.”

One thing we do know is that we’ll be back at Constance Billard with the new characters. “It’s the same high school, so we’re back at Constance Billard. We are looking at a group of friends in their junior year. Those pieces are the same. They’re still in the uniforms,” Safran told ET in December. “Not everyone lives on the Upper East Side, though. Brooklyn’s not the bad place to live. Brooklyn’s probably cooler in the new version than Manhattan, ’cause it is in some places. Other than that, it has the DNA of the original.”

But the kids will absolutely have a different relationship with social media than the original crew. “I think it very much represents where we will be at in 2020 when the show airs. It really looks at how social media has changed,” Safran also said. “You know, the first time around, when the show started people were, like, checking in places on Foursquare and updating their locations on Facebook. Things we would never do now because we don’t want anyone to know where we are. That change alone changes the dynamic of what Gossip Girl means and how Gossip Girl interacts with the kids this day and age, so I think it’s gonna be really interesting to see. The modern age reflected through Gossip Girl.”

The leads are nonwhite, and there will be plenty of LGBTQ+ storylines. Joshua Safran, who wrote and executive-produced the original show, confirmed this at Vulture Festival on November 10, 2019. “There was not a lot of representation the first time around on the show,” he said. “I was the only gay writer I think the entire time I was there. Even when I went to private school in New York in the ’90s, the school didn’t necessarily reflect what was on Gossip Girl. So this time around the leads are nonwhite. There’s a lot of queer content on this show. It is very much dealing with the way the world looks now, where wealth and privilege come from, and how you handle that. The thing I can’t say is there is a twist, and that all relates to the twist.”

The reboot officially began filming in New York City back in October. Following delays due to the coronavirus pandemic, new Gossip Girl stars Eli Brown and Whitney Peak were spotted filming a scene on location on November 5, giving fans their first look at the new series’ fashion. The two were photographed leaving a building together in what we can only assume was a date night, as they were both dressed up for a night out on the town.

The pics of the cast on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art are here. I’m obsessed. 

As of January 1, 2021, we were officially introduced to these new faces. In a series of posts on Instagram, the official Gossip Girl account shared a look at our new Upper East Siders with a one-word character description. 

Julien Callow (Jordan Alexander): Influence.

Monet de Haan (Savannah Smith): Power.

Luna La (Zion Moreno): Style.

Max Wolfe (Thomas Doherty): Freedom. (Anyone else getting Chuck Bass vibes?)

Audrey Hope (Emily Lynd): Grace.

Kate Keller (Tavi Gevinson): Ambition.

Otto “Obie” Bergmann IV (Eli Brown): Privilege. Okay, so maybe he’s the new Chuck Bass.

Akeno “Aki” Menzies (Evan Mock): Innocence.

Zoya Lott (Whitney Peak): Perspective.

We’ll update this post with more details as they come in. XOXO.

I still have a soft spot for Gossip Girl, despite its many ridiculous plot lines and even more ridiculous ending. (You know, when that guy was revealed as the titular G.G.) But for all its faults, the CW show delivered the goods, particularly when it came to love. Gossip Girl gave us so many couples throughout its six seasons—some good, some bad, some very, very confusing. 

Here’s our condensed list of Gossip Girl‘s most important couples: the ones that worked, and the ones that should have been banned from Manhattan.

Best

Serena and Nate 

I’ll say it: I wish these two had rekindled their flame. Dubbed the Golden Couple by Gossip Girl herself, the luscious locks between the two were reason enough for them to get back together. They made the prettiest couple. So! Pretty!

Chuck and Blair

When the show was on, I had no problem saying those three words, eight letters to these two: I love you. Ed Westwick and Leighton Meester had so much chemistry on G.G. that  my TV screen melted a little each time they were on it. Could a normal relationship withstand an attempt to sell the girlfriend for a hotel, a pregnancy and marriage to another (royal) guy, a near-death car accident, approximately 8 million breakups, and 9 billion revenge hookups? No. But the love between the bespoke-purple-suited Chuck and crowned-by-headband Blair was not for mere mortals. 

My feelings about Chuck are more complicated now, considering, in 2017, Westwick faced sexual assault charges. (He wasn’t prosecuted due to insufficient evidence, per NBC News.) But for our story here, we’ll focus on the fictional characters and not the men or women who play them.

Rufus and Lily

How did a couple that made no sense at all make so much sense? She’s Upper East Side; he’s Brooklyn. Her fashion is impeccable; he wears the same flannel shirt four times a week. They have a secret love child that neither of them seem to care about, and she left him at one point for Bart Bass. Yet Rufus and Lily always endured. I forever stan.