Blake Lively’s ex and former Gossip Girl co-star Penn Badgley has revealed why it was a “struggle” to date her.
The pair famously dated between 2007 – 2010, while they were filming the hit CW series.
During a candid new interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast, the actor admitted he struggled with blurring the lines between fiction and reality.
Penn and Blake played Dan Humphrey and Serena Van Der Woodsen in the show, who had an on-and-off romance on-screen.
“It was the struggle,” he told the podcast’s host Alex Cooper.
“What starts to happen when you’re in this one role for a long time — the aspect of celebrity being a part of it, a huge part of it — there is not enough separation, I think, for anybody.
“You’re seen as this person, you’re called their name out on the street. You also constantly have to be that person at work.”
The 38-year-old confessed he didn’t possess the “emotional maturity to understand how to differentiate” himself from his character “in terms of self-worth”.
“What people seemed to think of Dan seemed to be what people thought of me,” he admitted.
Although they split while filming the series, Penn has insisted they always remained professional on-set.
Speaking on a previous episode of his podcast Podcrushed, he said: “I’m pretty sure we were exes for nearly half of the run of the entire series.”
“We were always very professional. We had to do all kinds of nutso stuff. Having a fake marriage by the end of it,” he laughed.
“I don’t even think, in my memory, there was not one bit of strangeness. It wasn’t even a thing.”
