As much as Gossip Girl fans love Dan and Serena in the early seasons of the show, you might not know that actors Blake Lively and Penn Badgley dated behind the scenes too. They broke up a couple years into the series, but were so cool about it that no one on set even knew they separated.

“I found out on the set of the Season 2 finale,” executive producer Joshua Safran told Vanity Fair in 2017. “They kept the breakup hidden from the crew, which you could never do now. I don’t even know how they did it. They kept it from everybody which is a testament to how good they are as actors. Because they did not want their personal drama to relate to the show.”

Dan and Serena eventually break up too (and Serena goes on to date Nate, who should’ve totally been her endgame!) before getting married in the finale. I’ve never had to pretend to marry an ex, but Penn Badgley just revealed whether it was as weird as it sounds.

After joking that he’s “still processing” the fictional nuptials, Penn Badgley promises pretending to marry Blake Lively wasn’t actually that weird. “I sure don’t think it was awkward for anybody,” he says during an episode of his Podcrushed podcast. “I’m pretty sure we were exes for nearly half of the entire run of the series. It lasted for nearly six years and I don’t think we were together longer than two.”

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“We always were very professional,” he continues. “We had to do all kinds of nutso stuff…having a fake marriage [was easy].” Throughout the series run, Dan and Serena deal with everything from kidnappings to threesomes to their parents dating…so gathering their friends and family for a wedding was pretty chill.

“In my memory there was not one bit of strangeness,” he promises. “It wasn’t even a thing, again because everything in that show was about relationships of some form and so I feel like all of us had been in every configuration imaginable.”

This episode of Podcrushed also featured a conversation with Taylor Momsen, who played Penn Badgley’s onscreen sister Jenny. After reportedly leaving the series on bad terms in 2011 (articles at the time said the actress had been “unprofessional”), Momsen expressed gratitude for the Gossip Girl team allowing her to leave the show.

“It was weird for me suddenly overnight being tabloid famous, which is a different kind of famous,” she says. “They would photograph me on set…as my character and put it in the tabloids as ‘Taylor Momsen’…and that started to really bug me because my identity was getting kind of taken over…People had this perception of me that wasn’t me and I became really hyper-aware of how I carried myself.”

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After she decided she wanted to pursue music, and her band The Pretty Reckless, she had a conversation with the powers at be behind the scenes.

“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 continues. “They really allowed me to follow my dream, and I’m forever grateful and thankful to them for that.”

Momsen returned for the series finale (and Dan and Serena’s wedding), and it’s the kind of reunion we love to rewatch!