Interview

The jury is still out on whether Gossip Girl—the hedonistic teen soap opera beloved by the bobby-soxer in all of us—will rise from its slender-but-influential ratings share and turn the CW network from a caterpillar into a butterfly. And now it’s May. Game time. Sweeps month. Cliffhangers are ready. Fingers are crossed. Can the nation’s escapist mood that has been elevating box-office figures rescue the genre of the lavish television drama that has recently been in decline? Is Gossip Girl the end of the mighty nighttime soap or just the beginning?

One thing is certain: Gossip Girl itself is in no need of saving. The show has been picked up for a third year, and we know one prime reason why. This season, one of Gossip Girl’s biggest twists has been an unexpected victory of talent over mere beauty: The show’s two most lively, versatile, and engaging actors, Leighton Meester and Ed Westwick, have gotten more and more screen and story time. Virtue rewarded? It’s the kind of meritorious upset that would infuriate their characters, the show’s colorfully scheming on-and-off lovers Blair Waldorf and Chuck Bass.

But it only makes sense. Westwick’s wealthy, unscrupulous Chuck—slippery as a shark and just as dangerous to cross—has crystallized into a junior J.R. Ewing, a fantasy figure that all parents fear and that all girls . . . well, you know. And Westwick is so convincing as a teenage American Psycho that most people don’t even realize that he’s English, born and raised, with the wit of a Brit and the heart of a rocker. (He’s even got a band—ish.) Known for some bad-boy ways himself, Westwick comes across as part Chuck, part Liam (as in Gallagher), and, somewhere in there, a talented actor just bursting to get out. If he can just outmaneuver the tattoos . . . This is a cliffhanger worth tuning in for.

DAVID COLMAN: You’re already at work filming the third season of the show right now . . . How’s everything on the set?

ED WESTWICK: I have the day off, so instead of the set, I’m on the couch.

COLMAN: Where do you live? I don’t need an address, obviously, although I’m sure everybody who wants to know where you live has found out already, right?

WESTWICK: I think it’s not the most secret information . . . I was at New York Comic Con doing a signing for the S. Darko movie I’m in, and one of the promotion girls was like, “Do you still live in The Tate?” I was like, “What? How do you know where I live?” It’s quite unnerving, to say the least. But I guess that’s why you have a doorman.

COLMAN: It’s funny, I was at the Armani store opening a couple of nights ago on Fifth Avenue. It was a mob scene. Then all of a sudden there was your co-star and roommate, Chace Crawford, fighting through the crowd. I had this weird moment where reality and Gossip Girl merged—is this Chace or Nate Archibald?

WESTWICK: Those kind of over-the-top party settings are such a point on the show. We spend a lot of time working out scenes and basing stories around them. Parties provide quite the dramatic setting.

COLMAN: The producers are good at making everything on the show seem very New York.

WESTWICK: That’s based on the fact that we can shoot in New York . . . Know what I mean? There was some tax break for it or something, and now, apparently, they may be taking that away. So for us to still be shooting in New York is fantastic. Quite frankly, it’s essential to a show like ours.

COLMAN: Gossip Girl really relies on this mix of realness and fantasy.

WESTWICK: The locations and atmosphere make the drama and the scandal and the characters and the sometimes outrageous fashion statements more believable.

Can't get enough Gossip Girl? Click here to check out video, the latest news and your favorite quotes.