Gossip Girl Producer Reveals Blogger Was Almost a Completely Different Character

Xoxo, Gossip…who?

Though it’s been seven years since the identity of Gossip Girl was revealed in the 2012 series finale of the CW series of the same name, fans are still shaken to their core by the revelation that (spoiler alert!) Penn Badgley‘s Dan Humphrey was behind the blog.

But as it turns out, he wasn’t always the frontrunner for the mysterious snarky blogger.

“Dan was not my intended Gossip Girl,” Gossip Girl writer and executive producer Joshua Safran said at Vulture Festival over the weekend, according to Buzzfeed.

So who was the original Gossip Girl intended to be? According to Safran, it was Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively)’s own brother, Eric (Connor Paolo).

“We worked hard to kind of lay in tiny seeds about it being Eric, and then the NY Post wrote an article saying that Gossip Girl was Eric so we were like, ‘We gotta scratch that,'” he said.

Safran said the show then turned its attention to Chace Crawford‘s Nate Archibald.

“Then…one of the writers realized that Nate had never sent a tip in to Gossip Girl, which is true at least through the end of season five,” he said. “Nate never sent in a tip in through all of those episodes, which is when we’re like, ‘Oh, well then he’s Gossip Girl.'”

Safran, who left the show before the final season, admitted even he was surprised by the final reveal.

“I like to joke that Dan was Gossip Girl because I had left the show by then,” he said. “But, I understand why Dan was Gossip Girl. I just had my heart set on Nate.”

RELATED: Gossip Girl Writer Says HBOMax Reboot Will Be More Diverse — ‘The Leads Are Nonwhite’

Earlier this year, HBO Max announced plans for a Gossip Girl reboot helmed by original creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage. The revival will feature a brand-new cast of teens.

“Eight years after the original website went dark, a new generation of New York private school teens are introduced to the social surveillance of Gossip Girl,” the upcoming streaming service said in a statement. “The prestige series will address just how much social media — and the landscape of New York itself — has changed in the intervening years.”

Kristen Bell has signed on to narrate. The actress, 39, voiced the mysterious narrator during the series’ original run from 2007 to 2012. It is still unclear if any other original actors will make an appearance on the new show.