Taylor Momsen, “Gossip Girl ‘It Was Killing Me’.”
Momsen played Jenny Humphrey on the show, alongside co-stars such as Blake Lively, Penn Badgley and Leighton Meester. She ultimately left the series after Season 4 to focus full-time on her band, The Pretty Reckless.
During the podcast she said:
“Season one’s a whirlwind … then around season two I knew I had to leave. But leaving a career that is so prosperous was not easy.”
She clarified it was an easy decision for her personally, but getting out of her contract wasn’t:
“You’re in a lock-and-key contract with The CW, Warner Bros … It was a very long battle of me arguing [with] everyone, ‘Go and get me out of this. I can’t do this anymore. This is killing me.’”
Momsen recalled how she was even labelled “ungrateful” for wanting to pursue another path:
“All the things that come along with ‘How dare you turn your back on something that’s been so successful for you’ was hard.”
She admitted internally she felt:
“Oh, I just went f*** you. You don’t know what you’re talking — you’re not in my shoes so how dare you judge this.”
She also revealed that she turned to the show’s writers for help, as she was still bound by contract and prevented from taking on other projects. She said the writers agreed to write her out of the show so she could tour and focus on her music career. When asked how she told the rest of the cast, she laughed:
“I kind of just Irish-dipped. I just wasn’t in the script the next week.”
While the other cast members knew she had a band and was working on a record, she admitted they didn’t realise how serious she was about leaving the show. She later returned for the season 4 finale in 2012 because, as she said:
“As a fan of television … when you have the full cast together again … you want to full-circle that and round it out.”
Momsen reflected on her transition from child star to teenage actor on a major series:
“When it got into Gossip Girl … suddenly you’re being photographed as a character by paparazzi … And I’m getting hate from things I did on the show that I have nothing to do with. And I was young. I was 14.”
She added:
“That’s where I started to realise like, I’m not good at being someone else’s tool. Like, I need to be my own person.”
Previously on her former co-star Penn Badgley’s Podcrushed podcast in 2023, Momsen spoke about her loneliness on set and how music became a refuge:
“I was so much younger than all of you … That’s where music became such a solace for me. … I was the new girl. I was Grinch-girl. I was always in this kind of weird, isolated world …”
Today, Momsen continues her work with The Pretty Reckless. Her latest release is a holiday-EP, Taylor Momsen’s Pretty Reckless Christmas, which dropped October 31 and features six tracks including a cover of “Where Are You Christmas”. Her band is also slated to tour with AC/DC, beginning February 24, 2026 in North and South America.
