Taylor Momsen is "forever grateful and thankful" to the Gossip Girl team for writing her off the show
Taylor Momsen just wanted to write songs and tour with her band The Pretty Reckless
Hannah Montana stretched the limits of reality in many ways, but perhaps the most egregious was how simply impossible it would have been for poor Miley to be a decent student and worldwide pop star all at once. Actors can’t even go to fictional high school (or college) and maintain a music thriving music career—just look at Drake from Degrassi, Donald Glover’s exit from Community, and most recently Reneé Rapp’s graduation from Sex Lives Of College Girls (allegedly to the ire of scrambling showrunners). At least when Gossip Girl’s Taylor Momsen wanted to drop out of Constance Billard, it sounds like her principal was on her side.
Momsen, who portrayed Jenny Humphrey as a series regular on the first four seasons of the 2007 show, recently opened up about her exit on the “Podcrushed” podcast, hosted by ex-costar Penn Badgley (via Variety). While there were reports of her “diva” behavior on set at the time, Momsen has maintained for years that she quit the show to focus on her music career, a decision she says the Gossip Girl team thoroughly supported. (Whether or not this was because she was indeed acting like a diva is unclear.)
“[Acting] was a childhood thing that I got put into at two years old. I wasn’t making my own choices then,” Momsen said. “Literally, as soon as I got to an age where I could make my own decisions, it was like a click… I woke up one morning and went, ‘Wait a second. I don’t have to do this? I don’t have to do this other job? I can just play in my band and tour and write songs? I can just do that?’ Granted, a little more complicated to get out of a television show than that, but the answer was yes.”
“They went, ‘Well, we can’t let you out of your deal, but we can write you out of the show, so you can go on tour,’” she continued. (Momsen only appeared in four episodes of season four.) “They really allowed me to follow my dream, and I’m forever grateful and thankful to them for that.” The Pretty Reckless is still making music—they released a new album in 2022 called Other Worlds—so it seems like it all worked out in the end.