How Savannah Lee Smith Became the ‘Gossip Girl’ Queen Bee

If there’s one show that actors and audiences alike spend their time dreaming about being cast in, it’s Gossip Girl. Who wouldn’t want to flex their malicious muscles to play a bratty teen with so much time and money on their hands that they simply just don’t know what to do with it?

For those of us who grew up watching Leighton Meester and Blake Lively tear their way through the high school caste system like it was a Bergdorf’s sample sale, HBO Max’s reboot of Gossip Girl was practically a godsend. When it debuted in 2021, the state of bitchy teen TV was faltering, propped up on the splintering wooden stilts of Riverdale and Euphoria. While they were worthy successors in their own right, neither show has ever been quite able to match the classic CW series’ unique formula of melodrama and salacious scandal.

Now, enter a new crew of Gossip Girl teens, handpicked to continue the legacy of the original show that was still teeming with cultural ubiquity. Sure, these new kids are all pretty, but can they throw down in a verbal sparring match in the way we so know and love?

If you watched the reboot’s first season, you may have a difficult time answering that question. With creator and showrunner Josh Safran’s reluctance to rely on the catfights and slut-shaming that the original series trademarked itself with, the new Gossip Girl struggled with finding its footing among fans and critics. “As we all know, teenagers never do or say anything out of line when placed in stressful social situations with heightened emotions and hormones,” one Twitter user sarcastically pointed out in response to Safran’s planned changes—a common refrain among viewers online.

Though Gossip Girl’s first season was a slow burn, it ended on a promise to amp things up in Season 2. And with the second episode airing this week, it’s safe to say that things have turned a corner on the Upper East Side. The catfights have returned—god bless!—and the show’s pace is faster, punchier, and less self-conscious. It’s also giving its characters far more to do, including some proper scheming between Contance Billard’s Queen Bee contenders, Monet de Haan (Savannah Lee Smith) and Julien Calloway (Jordan Alexander).

While the first season relegated Monet to one of Julien’s henchwomen, the character—and Smith herself—became the fan-favorite underdogs. With a juicier role in Season 2, we couldn’t help but take notice of Monet’s ascent among the show’s power players. The teen queen crown is on the line, after all. The Daily Beast’s Obsessed sat down with Smith to talk about Monet’s second-season arc, the return of the catfights, throwing herself into a fountain in vintage Dolce, and what she’d love to see for her character in Season 3.

We’re nearly halfway into Season 2. How does it feel to be back in the saddle, so to speak?

It feels good! The support that we’ve been getting for this second season is really validating and reassuring. We felt it on set—we were like, “I think this is even better,” and we hoped people would have a good response. But it has definitely exceeded my expectations, in terms of my character specifically.

Monet’s queen aspirations are really dialed up this season. She gets to be even more catty and scheming. How has it been, dipping into Monet’s more wicked side?

It’s been awesome. [Laughs]. It’s been really, really fun to be really mean. In the first season, her drive to make Julien the best was really there, [but] she still had that cunningness about her. Now, in Season 2, it was a lot more fun for me because she’s doing it for herself. Monet opens up a lot in her chase to glory and power, but also you see a lot more colors from her. She cries! That was a big thing.

Are you a good crier on cue, or did that take some work?

I can cry on cue pretty easily! And in that scene specifically, I was really excited to finally show a different side of Monet and show that I am a dramatic actor and consider myself more dramatic than [the character of] Gossip Girl! It was fun to get to show my chops and sink my teeth into it, and on top of that it was a night shoot—three in the morning, we had been there all day. And then Amanda Warren, who plays [Monet’s mother] Camille, she made it easy for me to cry—I was a little intimidated!

Has it been daunting for your first major screen role to be a big show like Gossip Girl?

The desire to prove myself and show people that I really do believe I have talent overrides the anxiety about it. But I do remember the first time I was really nervous, and it was the first scene I had ever done with 50 extras. And I started in theater, so having an audience doesn’t bother me, but it’s just a different environment because everyone’s looking at you—

—And everyone has to be fake-talking while you’re doing the real talking.

I’ve had to get over that awkwardness, but other than that it’s been amazing.

You’ve gotten to be much more physical this season. You get to push Jordan Alexander around and throw yourself into a fountain. What are those days like on set for you?

For the catfight at the Deb Ball, it was really fun, because it was all of us in this gorgeous library at 3 a.m. It felt like a giant sleepover. We had an all-women stunt team come in from Brooklyn, and it was my first time working with a stunt coordinator. It felt like choreography and we’re in these gowns. It felt like a play, really theatrical, which was really fun for me. But I was really terrified to fall into the fountain.

To be fair, it looked really shallow.

Oh, it was. I was being a baby-and-a-half. It was extremely shallow, I did have a stunt coordinator, and there was a mat underneath the water for me to fall onto. But it was that I had to fall backwards! I was like, “What if I miss it and then I bang my head on something?” And I really only had one take. [Our costume designer] Eric Daman was like, “This is a one-take moment. This is a vintage Dolce dress.” But I got it!

Something fans love about Monet is that you can see how her quest for power is tangled in her desire to be loved. What do you think it is about Monet that resonates with the show’s audience so much?

She’s the mean girl that everyone loves to hate and hates to love. That trope is an integral part of Gossip Girl. That’s why Blair was so iconic, and I think Monet brings elements of that. Now that we’re in Season 2, I think people will grow to understand and like her more because of how dynamic she is. We can all relate to putting up an exterior or a wall because you don’t want to be vulnerable. That’s all she is, but she executes it very awfully…clearly she’s doing this to hide something.

The first season got some blowback from longtime Gossip Girl fans for not feeling like the original series. This season, there’s a clear push to bring back some of the elements that fans loved about the original series, while staying true to this one’s own style and feel. What do you say to the people who are still wary of the reboot?

I would say that we listened—or Josh and the writers [listened]. Even in the first four episodes, you can definitely see that the writers paid attention to the fact that people were missing some aspects of the catfights and things moving a little bit quicker. [This season] there’s a lot less dialogue. There’s a lot more fun stuff happening on screen. … But I feel like this season unfolds really nicely, and that it does have a lot of aspects of the OG.

In a few weeks, Season 2 will already be over and we’ll be heading into Season 3. So in that spirit, if you could pick three things you want to see for Monet in Season 3, what would they be?

Ooh. See, you know that I’m a Type A. I love planning, I love thinking ahead.

We’re manifesting.

I know that a lot of people on Twitter want to see Monet fall in love, and I want to see that too. For me, the actor that plays Monet, I don’t even know how I would play that and how she would navigate that, and that would be a really fun thing to explore. I’d love to see stuff that’s more in-depth with her parents, specifically her dad. We get Camille a little bit now, but I think with Grayson, there’s some stuff there! I think the De Haans are a really iconic family.

The other thing: Grace Duah [who plays Shan] and I were talking about this on set, this idea that we’re going to talk to Josh about. Maybe Monet and Shan knew each other a long time ago, and no one talks about it. I’d love to see Monet and Shan have some moments together in Season 3. Grace is amazing. Let’s manifest it.