The Many Lives Of Leighton Meester

“Oh, there’s my AirPod,” says Leighton Meester, scooping up the errant headphone that falls out of the pocket of her loose button-down shirt as she settles into a picnic table at Blueys, a laid-back cafe in Santa Monica whose patrons, on a recent Tuesday, don’t seem to recognize the 39-year-old in mom garb as the one-time ingénue who terrified the Parents Television Council (and titillated everyone else) when she appeared on billboards topless in a pool with her arms thrown passionately around a strapping, dripping-wet Nate Archibald.

Or maybe it was Chuck Bass? It’s hard to remember, since it’s been almost 20 years since Meester inhabited the headband of Blair Waldorf, Gossip Girl’s conniving Queen Bee, and although she looks virtually the same, life has changed. She’s married to Adam Brody, who shares the distinction of having played an equally iconic character in an early-aughties teen drama (Seth Cohen on TheO.C.), has two children, and has been by all accounts living a relatively low-key Hollywood life.

Up until this year, when Nobody Wants This, Brody’s new Netflix show, became a breakout hit, reigniting his heartthrob status and interest in the couple, whose adorability dominated the coverage of awards season this year. “leighton meester and adam brody kiss when he won IM SOBBING,” wrote one user on X over an image from the Critics Choice Awards that prompted so many cartoon hearts, Moo Deng would weep with jealousy.

“They are both like these millennial icons, and the idea that they somehow got together in real life and started a family I think kind of blew people’s minds,” says Nobody Wants This creator Erin Foster, who was subsequently inspired to write Meester a guest spot in the show’s second season, out this fall.

Indeed, it seemed possible a Leightonaissance might be gaining momentum: Amazon reportedly acquired the rights to her charming but little-seen CW sitcom Good Cop/Bad Cop; Apple created a special trailer emphasizing her presence in the new season of its Gossip Girl-meets-Bridgerton-style bodice-ripper The Buccaneers. On TikTok, Flavor Flav encouraged viewers to “to hype up my girl Leighton Meester and help her family recover from the fire,” while dancing to her 2009 single with Robin Thicke. “Queen B is coming back ya'll!!!!!!!” one X user wrote when it was announced that Meester would play a supporting role in Rachel Sennott’s eagerly awaited new HBO sitcom.

All of which elicits approximately the same amount of enthusiasm from Meester as the recovery of her lost earbud. “That’s nice,” she says mildly, after I recount these triumphs to her with breathless enthusiasm.

Her muted reaction was puzzling but, thinking it through, I concluded that there could be a few reasons for it. Maybe it was annoying that people acted like she’d fallen off the face of the earth when she’d merely been working in the — diminished but still respectable — land of network television. Maybe it was bothersome to have her comeback tied to the professional success of her husband — or worse, to the supposed “downfall” of her former Gossip Girl co-star Blake Lively, to whom sexism dictates she remain engaged in a perpetual, fictional rivalry. Maybe big-ups from Flavor Flav is a small consolation for losing your home in a fire.

Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe Leighton Meester is so well-adjusted, she didn’t actually base her self-worth on one-off job offers and the opinions of strangers on the internet?

This seemed unlikely, but then I cast back to a conversation I had with Meester 15 years ago, at the height of her Gossip Girl fame: We met in a cafe in the East Village, where she was sipping chamomile tea and writing in a journal and informed me that she avoided Googling herself. “People, I think, lose track of what's important if they get too caught up in what people think of them or being famous or whatever it is,” she said.

I did not include this in the article at the time because everyone says stuff like this, but now I have to consider that in her case it might actually have been true.

I consulted Zuzanna Szadkowski, who got to know Meester well while playing Dorota, Blair Waldorf’s maid on Gossip Girl,for six seasons. As it turns out, they’re still friends: Szadkowski finds it funny when other people clock the two of them when they’re out in public, “Like, ‘Oh, Blair and her maid, 20 years later,’” she says. Meester never notices. “If Blair Waldorf is defined by where she is in the social stratosphere, Leighton is in my opinion the polar opposite,” Szadkowski tells me. “She cares about doing good work and her family. She was never interested in being a star for star’s sake. She literally doesn’t care about that stuff at all.”

I had to admit it tracked. If Meester was interested in being a star for star’s sake, we’d probably have seen a perfume or a lingerie line or at least heard the piano ballad she recorded with Lil Wayne in 2012 on TikTok. “I just didn’t feel like I sang that well in those songs,” she says of her short-lived, at the time well-received foray into pop music. “That’s why I stopped doing that style of songwriting, because I didn’t feel really good when I would sing it. That was something that I figured out in my 20s.” (Meester did release an album that was more her style, Heartstrings, in 2014.)

She and Brody didn’t even have a wedding. “On sets and in life, I’ve been able to wear a fancy dress and hit a mark and say lines, and I didn’t want it to feel like that,” she says. “I wanted it to feel intimate and private.”

Meester clarifies: “I’m an actor. So I do appreciate attention.” It just isn’t her primary motivator, apparently, or the thing that drew her into acting. Meester has talked about her childhood a lot, how she was born while her parents were serving a federal prison sentence for their involvement in a marijuana-smuggling ring, and lived in the care of her grandparents in Marco Island, Florida until her mother was released.

That was where she first discovered performing: in a local production of the Wizard of Oz. Afterwards, when she was 10, her mom found her a talent agent, and they relocated along with Leighton’s brothers to New York, then Los Angeles, where she modeled for YM and acted in shows like Law & Order before landing Gossip Girl at age 20. “I was a kid, and people would ask me, like, ‘What’s your favorite designer?’ And I literally did not know what that meant.”

But she had an instinctual knack for complex character work. Stephanie Savage, one of the showrunners on Gossip Girl, told me that early on, the writers on the show stopped putting things like “Blair’s lip quivers” into the scripts because Meester already knew what to do.

“She really created this fleshed-out human fully from scratch,” recalls Zadowski, who marveled at her transformation. “There was a vulnerability to that character that people really related to, and at the same time she was so funny.”

This sentiment is echoed by Erin Foster, who was “blown away” by Meester’s table read for Nobody Wants This. “I don’t think people understand how funny she is,” Foster says, recalling how Meester, who plays a self-serious momfluencer, had them all in stitches with her improv.

“At the same time, she managed to make her feel like a real influencer, who is very sincere about how ridiculous her life is.”

Meester has a soft spot for characters like this: women who are “a little emotionally stunted, or make poor choices, or can’t quite get themselves together,” as she puts it. Lou in Good Cop/Bad Cop is one, as is her character on The Buccaneers. “Most of the time, there’s some sort of origin or backstory or reason why they’re like that,” Meester explains. “Like, this person doesn’t have a dark heart, but they have this insecurity or something they haven't quite figured out or examined, and it’s up to me to figure out what’s causing them pain. And I inevitably find myself in the role, almost always. I mean, that’s it. That’s the real gift. Of this industry or whatever. It’s so helpful in terms of discovering things about yourself when you’re trying to discover something about somebody else. You’re like, ‘Oh, no, in trying to embody this other person I just learned about myself and how I process things and how I see the world or how I'm actually really f*cked up and not good at this thing or whatever.’”

I’m not going to ask Meester to outline for me all of the ways she is f*cked up, because by now I realize she is too well-adjusted to do that. But as she speaks, I am reminded of something that happened just after the fourth season of Gossip Girl, when Meester filed a lawsuit against her mother, alleging, among other things, that she’d spent money intended for her brother’s medical treatment on personal luxuries like Botox.

Meester and her mother eventually settled, insofar as something like that can ever be settled, and Meester doesn’t want to talk about it now. But it stands to reason that such an experience would affect her, especially now that she has her own family. And it goes some way toward explaining why a Leightonaissance might not have quite as much appeal for her as the rest of us.

“There’s been a lot of stuff that I haven’t done because I want to be with them,” she says of her children, who are 9 and 4 and traveled with her to Scotland for the Buccaneers andAustralia for Good Cop/Bad Cop (on which Brody also did a guest appearance). “I don’t like being away from them. I’m sure a lot of people feel this way, but I’m especially not into it. Obviously, for the very right thing, I would probably just be like, ‘Let’s figure it out.’ I mean, I’m not going to leave my family for a year. We’re not doing that. But apart from that, we have a good system in place, where I can consider jobs carefully. And every other piece of life.”

“It’s been really, very lovely to do a couple of shows where there is that feeling of: there could be a future there,” she goes on. “But I don’t know,” she adds. “People are always asking, ‘What do you want to do? Where do you see yourself? Where do you want to go?’ And I’m like, I don't know. I don’t know if it’s motherhood or this current situation or this business. You kind of can’t be like, ‘I know what I'm doing three years from now.’ I’m just, like, OK right now,” she says, finishing with another platitude that, in her case, has the ring of honesty. “I just feel like being in the moment and figuring it out as I go along, because that’s all we can do, you know?”

Top image credits: Saint Laurent clothing and accessories