Taylor Momsen is setting the record straight about her Gossip Girl exit — and what really happened after she decided to leave the hit CW series behind.
The actress and musician, who played Jenny Humphrey, walked away from the show midway through Season 4 to focus on her rock band, The Pretty Reckless. But as she revealed on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, her decision wasn’t exactly a long, dramatic goodbye — it was more like a quiet disappearance.
“I kind of just Irish-dipped,” Taylor admitted. “I just wasn’t on the script the next week.”
According to Taylor, her castmates knew she was passionate about music, but not how serious she was. “They all knew I was making music. They all knew I had a band. I would play them stuff because I was working on the first record while I was on the show,” she explained. “I would come in and play songs … but I don’t think anyone knew how serious I was at that stage.”
Taylor, who began acting at age three and famously starred as Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, said the decision to leave Gossip Girl came easily — but actually getting out of her contract was a nightmare.
“It was an easy decision for me,” she said. “To actually get [out of] a contract was not easy.”
The singer recalled fighting to be released from her obligations with Warner Bros. Television and being labeled “ungrateful” in the process. “I just went, ‘F*** you. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not in my shoes, so how dare you judge this?’” she remembered. “They wouldn’t let me outta the contract. The head of Warner Bros. said, ‘F*** Taylor Momsen. No f***ing way.’”
Ultimately, Taylor credits Gossip Girl creators Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz for helping her finally move on. “I really have to credit them for doing that for me ’cause they did not have to,” she said. “They wrote me out of the show so I could go on tour and be in a band.”
Though she was relieved to leave, Taylor still made peace with her time on the series — even returning for the finale in 2012. “As a fan of television and a fan of the shows, I love when you have the full cast together again,” she said. “You want to full-circle that and round it out.”
Still, escaping Jenny Humphrey hasn’t been easy. “The first year, you get it. The second year, you kind of laugh at it,” she shared. “As it kept going, I was going, ‘Oh, I’m never gonna outlive this character.’ … You just kind of … live your life.”
