Hey Upper East Siders, get this. Gossip Girl herself almost didn’t have a voice in the original series.
In the opening episode of Jessica Szohr’s Gossip Girl-themed podcast, XOXO, creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage talk about how the voice of the online blogger was almost cut from the series.
Kristen Bell voiced Gossip Girl for all six seasons of the series, which aired from 2007 to 2012. Schwartz recalled that a test audience watching the pilot episode revealed a lowered interest in the series whenever Bell’s voice appeared. The audience was asked to turn a dial up if they were interested in the show’s plot and down if they lost interest, Schwartz explained.
“Interestingly, every time the Gossip Girl voiceover would kick in, it would drop,” Schwartz said. “People were into it, and then like, ‘Who’s this voice that’s coming in and distracting me?’ Do you lose the voice-over? [We decided] we can’t. That’s part of the show and we just have to ride with it.”
The creators also shared that Bell was the only voice actor who read for the part, regardless of her starring on another CW series, Veronica Mars, at the time of her casting.
“We had some reluctance of, did we feel comfortable having two shows on the same network with the same voiceover?” Savage said.
It all worked out. Veronica Mars was cancelled and Bell was asked to star as the voice of Gossip Girl. The creators said, in the end, her voice wasn’t too similar.
“When she recorded it, she created an entirely different character with just her voice than how she read Veronica Mars,” Savage explained.
Schwartz called Bell’s role “one of the most critical pieces of casting in the whole dang thing.”
She became so memorable that when creating the Gossip Girl reboot, signing Bell was the first priority.
“When we did the new show, which we knew would be a new generation and cast… the one piece we needed to have was Kristen,” said Schwartz. “That was the one piece that was gonna make it feel like Gossip Girl because she’s so – she’s the tone. She set the tone.”
