Like many people who grew up in the early 2000s, I was obsessed with Gossip Girl at one point. Taylor Momsen’s Jenny Humphrey was a standout character in the Gossip Girl cast for me because she was more around my age than the other characters on the show. But then out of the blue in the middle of Season 4, she was suddenly no longer on the show. The actress has now shared what happened behind the scenes.
Momsen, who is currently 32, has spent most of her adult years as the frontwoman of the rock band The Pretty Reckless (one time she got bitten by a bat during one of her concerts). When she was on the Call Her Daddy podcast, she said this of her departure from Gossip Girl:
They wrote me out of the show so I could go on tour and be in a band… I just kind of Irish dipped, and I just wasn’t in the script the next week.
Momsen formed her band in 2009 during Gossip Girl‘s run, and as she explained, she decided to exit the series in order to take her band on the road. However, as Momsen revealed in the interview, she didn’t even tell her cast mates about leaving, she just “Irish dipped.” She continued:
I mean they all knew I was making music, I had a band. I would play them stuff on the first record while I was on the show. So, I would come in and play songs and play music, and that kind of stuff. But, I don’t think anyone knew how serious I was at that stage.
As Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper pointed out, the rest of the actors like Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, Chace Crawford and others must have been curious where Taylor was at first since she never said a proper goodbye. To be fair, she was just 16.
There wasn’t really any social media back in 2009, so it’s not like they could see she was on the road on their smartphones. Even so, someone must have let them know of Momsen’s new endeavors. She did end up returning as a guest star for the Gossip Girl ending episode in 2012.
In the interview, Taylor Momsen also shared that leaving the show was a “long battle” because she had penned a contract with Warner Bros. Apparently another reason the actress wanted out of Gossip Girl was because she didn’t want to be an actress. She told the podcast it was “killing” her and there was “something else” she wanted to do with her life.
Of course, Momsen started acting as a child, famously starring in How The Grinch Stole Christmas as Cindy Lou Who. Momsen has opened up about being “teased relentlessly” for the role. Momsen and Jim Carrey reunited 25 years after the movie’s release earlier this month.
Since starting her band, The Pretty Reckless has made four albums together, headlined five tours and won a number of awards. A lot of people certainly must have started listening to the rock band because Jenny Humphrey was in it, too, even though it meant the end of the character!