Taylor Momsen didn’t tell ‘Gossip Girl’ costars she was leaving show

Gossip Girl fans weren’t alone in their surprise when Jenny Humphrey bid farewell to the Upper East Side.

Taylor Momsen, who played the social-climbing schemer across the first four seasons of the teen drama, recently divulged the details of her abrupt exit from the show. Among them was the fact that she didn’t warn her costars that her character was getting written out.

“I kind of just Irish-dipped,” Momsen admitted during her appearance on the latest episode of Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast. “I just wasn’t on the script the next week.”

Momsen, who left the show in the middle of season 4 to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter, explained, “They all knew I was making music. They all knew I had a band. I would play them stuff because I was working on the first record while I was on the show, so I would come in and play songs … and, you know, that kind of stuff, but I don’t think anyone knew how serious I was at that stage.”

Starring Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, Penn Badgley, Chace Crawford, and Ed Westwick, Gossip Girl was massively popular when Momsen began plotting her departure. The show debuted to positive reviews in 2007 and grew its audience between seasons. But having started her acting career at just 2 years old, Momsen knew she was ready to walk away.

“It was an easy decision for me,” Momsen said of leaving the show.

However, she added, “To actually get outta a contract was not easy. ”

She explained that because of her “lock-and-key contract” with the CW and Warner Bros. Television, exiting the show was no simple task.

“It was a very long battle of me arguing [with] everyone and going, ‘Get me outta this. I can’t do this anymore. This is killing me. I have something else I want to do with my life, and it has nothing to do with this, and I can’t be stuck here anymore,'” she recalled.

Momsen said she was labeled “ungrateful” at the time and criticized for her efforts to leave the series, but added that she had no trouble shrugging off the fallout.

“I just went, ‘F— you. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not in my shoes, so how dare you judge this?'” she recalled. “I was very defensive, but it came down to they wouldn’t let me outta the contract. The head of Warner Bros. said, ‘F— Taylor Momsen. No f—ing way.'” 

She ended up speaking to the show’s writers, Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz, who agreed to write her character off. Because they had no control over her contract, this still meant Momsen couldn’t act in other shows or movies — but seeing as she was ready to begin her career as a musician in earnest, that was not a problem. 

“I’m like, ‘That’s perfectly fine. I’m trying to get out. It’s not what I wanna do anyway,'” Momsen said on Call Her Daddy. “So I really have to credit them for doing that for me ’cause they did not have to, and they wrote me out of the show so I could go on tour and be in a band.”

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Gossip Girl centered around a group of wealthy high school students who are being terrorized by a mysterious and vicious blogger (who was voiced by Kristen Bell) who mercilessly spills all of their secrets. The six-season show concluded in 2012, but not without bringing Momsen back into the fold.

“As a fan of television and a fan of the shows, I love when you have the full cast together again,” Momsen said on the podcast. “You want to full-circle that and round it out.”

Momsen, who confessed that she still hasn’t actually watched the snarky teen melodrama, also clarified that she doesn’t “resent” Gossip Girl or her time as Jenny — but she did have a complicated relationship with it in the immediate aftermath of her departure.

“When I left the show and I was no longer on it, and I was just touring with the band and just putting out music… every question in every interview was still about Gossip Girl and Jenny Humphrey and ‘will you ever go back to acting?’ and blah, blah, blah,” she recalled. “The first year, you get it. The second year, you kind of laugh at it.”

But, she added, “As it kept going, I was going, ‘Oh, I’m never gonna outlive this character,’ and that’s a weird thing to come to grips with, so you just kind of … I ignored it. You live your life.”

Watch Momsen’s full Call Her Daddy interview above.