Taylor Momsen Reveals the Real Reason She Left Gossip Girl: “I Just Didn’t Want to Be There”

Taylor Momsen is opening up about the tough fight she had to go through to leave Gossip Girl and follow her real passion, music.

In a new interview on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast, Momsen talked about the long battle she faced with studio executives when she decided she wanted out of the show. She played Jenny Humphrey, Dan Humphrey’s younger sister, from the very first season until she left in season four.

“It was an easy decision for me,” she said. “To actually get out of a contract was not easy. It was a very long battle of me arguing [with] everyone and going, ‘Get me outta this. I can’t do this anymore. This is killing me. I have something else I want to do with my life, and it has nothing to do with this, and I can’t be stuck here anymore.’”

Momsen explained that some people at Warner Bros. Television didn’t take her decision well. “You’re called all the things that come along with, ‘How dare you turn your back on something that’s been so successful for you,’” she said, adding that she was even labeled “ungrateful.”

When the studio refused to release her from her contract, Momsen turned to the Gossip Girl showrunners, Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz, for help. “They essentially went, ‘Well, we can’t let you out of the contract because that’s not our job, but we can write you out of the show. We understand what you’re trying to do here,’” she shared. “I really have to credit them for doing that for me because they did not have to, and they wrote me out of the show so I could go on tour and be in a band.”

Even though Momsen had been acting since childhood with roles in How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams, she said music was always what she wanted to do most. After leaving Gossip Girl in 2010, she began touring with her rock band, The Pretty Reckless.

Talking about how her exit happened, she admitted it was sudden. “I kind of just Irish-dipped. I just wasn’t on the script the next week,” Momsen said. “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. I would come in and play songs, but I don’t think anyone knew how serious I was at that stage.”

Even after moving on from acting, Momsen came back briefly to play Jenny again in the Gossip Girl 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.”

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