The Gossip Girl Drama Expands From On-Screen to IRL

It turns out the teachers aren’t the only ones listening in on the students of Constance Billard, aka stars of the Gossip Girl reboot series. Suki Waterhouse made as much clear last week, taking the fictional teenaged bullies who name-checked her in episode 3 to task. There was, however, one major difference. The actor, model, and singer did so in real life, tagging the HBO Max show and one of its writers in two tweets she’s since deleted.

If you haven’t been keeping up with the on-screen drama, the IRL one requires quite a bit of context. The show stars Whitney Peak as Zoya, who’s not only just had a falling-out with her formerly estranged half-sister Julien (Jordan Alexander), but is now dating Julien’s ex-boyfriend, Obie (Eli Brown). Rest assured: Julien’s besties do not approve—Luna (Zión Moreno) chief among them. Yet again attempting to explain to Zoya why, she endeavors to put things simply: “As far as the press is concerned, he’s R-Patz and you’re Suki Nobody.”

In other words, per Luna, Obie is like Robert Pattinson—a top-tier-profile heartthrob with legions of adorers. Zoya, on the other hand, is like Waterhouse, a fellow actor who has been linked to Pattinson since 2018. One star in this scenario is, of course, bigger than the other in the eye of the American press. (Twilight, anyone?) Not that Waterhouse has ever disputed as much, including in Glamour’s screenshots of what appear to be deleted tweets. Instead, she focused on something bigger.

“Another day to be reminded that women can also be the patriarchy,” Waterhouse wrote alongside a still captioned “fuck the patriarchy,” featuring Luna and fellow Julien ride-or-die Monet earlier in the episode. “Seeing critiques of the patriarchy and sexism, then I get name-checked as somebody's nobody girlfriend,” she continued in a follow-up tweet, adding a zany emoji. “Make it make sense.”

What does make sense: an in-the-know, relatively niche namecheck or reference. Gossip Girl has relied on those to prove its relevance ever since its first iteration, as a book series in the early aughts. In fact, you might even consider a mention a compliment. What doesn’t make sense: that Luna—so far among the few to deliver the show’s usual zingers—wouldn’t come up with something cleverer. As one Blair Waldorf once put it, “You need to be cold to be queen.”