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Penn Badgley says his relationship with Blake Lively "saved" him

16 February 2023, 15:34

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By Katie Louise Smith

"Blake didn’t drink, and I think our relationship in some ways saved me from forcing myself to go down that road."

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Penn Badgley has opened up about his former relationship with Blake Lively, and how their relationship "saved" him from 'going down the road' of substance abuse.

Penn and Blake dated way back in 2007 when they both co-starred on Gossip Girl as Dan Humphrey and Serena van der Woodsen. Their relationship lasted for three years, and they were together for the first three seasons of the series.

The hype around Gossip Girl when it was airing was huge, and the entire cast were receiving an increasingly overwhelming amount of attention as the series went on. Penn has now opened up about that time in his life and how he was "biding time" with his iconic TV role.

Penn Badgley says his relationship with Blake Lively "saved" him. Picture: Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SiriusXM, Jamie McCarthy/WireImage

Speaking about his experience on one of the biggest TV shows of the '00s, Penn confessed to Variety that he felt "not invested" in his career as a television actor at all.

"I didn’t want to be in television," Penn said. "I was biding time a lot with Dan — I was not invested. And I’m not saying it’s a good thing! I’m saying it’s just what it was."

Penn described those days as "fun and fast-paced" but he also explained that there was a "dark undercurrent that would bottom out in my later 20s."

Penn then shares that his then-relationship with Blake Lively was a huge help to him at the time. "To be honest, I never struggled with substance," he added. "Blake didn’t drink, and I think our relationship in some ways saved me from forcing myself to go down that road."

Penn and Blake dated for three years, from 2007 to 2010. Picture: Getty

Penn didn't dive into his relationship with Blake in the interview anymore than that, but he did open up about having "nothing short of a spiritual crisis" at the time and how he worked through it.

"Like anybody who experiences some degree of fame and wealth, I was presented with the universal truth that not only does it not make your life better or easier, it actually can greatly complicate things, and make you quite unhappy," he said.

"I was never anything that I would define as suicidal at all, but I was certainly in a despair," he continued. "It had to do with ‘Do I matter? Do I matter? Does anything matter?’ These questions do inform how we feel. The answer that I came upon was ‘Yes.’ I think we all have to come to that. I don’t know how you could come to ‘No’ and be happy, so we all have to come to that ‘Yes’ somehow. Probably repeatedly."