Actual Upper East Siders spotted the cast of the upcoming Gossip Girl reboot filming on — where else? — the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier this week. The steps of the Met figured prominently into the original Gossip Girl; Blake Lively’s Serena van der Woodsen and Leighton Meester’s Blair Waldorf frequently lunched there, somehow without running into a million tourists. Paparazzi photos captured the new cast of the HBO Max reboot, including previously announced stars Emily Alyn Lind, Tavi Gevinson, Thomas Doherty, Adam Chanler-Berat, and Zión Moreno, filming what appears to be a much more inclusive lunch scene for the series.
This is evidently in keeping with reboot writer Joshua Safran’s vision for the new iteration of Gossip Girl. “There was not a lot of representation the first time around on the show,†Safran said at last year’s Vulture Festival. “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.†Maybe the twist has something to do with Laura Benanti, who is absent from the paparazzi photos and is playing an unannounced role in the series. Sadly, we’ll have to wait until 2021 to find out, due to coronavirus delays.