Brody and Meester managed to check all those boxes for each other. And though it would be several years before they paired off for good, 2007—the year The O.C. ended and Gossip Girl’s six-season run began—was when they first met. And at least one of them remembers.
“Josh Schwartz produced both shows and literally the first time we met, that whole cast was eating at Canter’s and I lived at Canter’s for like my entire 20s,” Brody told Faris, name-checking a famed Los Angeles deli. “And I was leaving, and he introduced all of us.”
Their young-Hollywood paths crossed here and there, he recalled, but he never spent much time with her until they were both cast in the romantic-dramedy ensemble of The Oranges, which started filming in New Jersey in March 2010.
“I was very attracted to her from jump,” the American Fiction actor said with a laugh. “She’s a heavenly creature…But I had no idea whether she was a good person or not. And in fact, kind of assumed she probably wasn’t for, like, the first handful of years that I didn’t know her, just ’cause, I don’t know, Gossip Girl?”
Not that he didn’t already know from experience that actresses could be perfectly nice people (“I never believe that stigma”) and that the whole point of acting is usually that you’re not the person you play onscreen. But as he said, he didn’t know her.
“I thought she was gorgeous,” Brody added, “and even when we did the movie there was chemistry there, but I was seeing someone. And I was like, ‘Oh, she’s cool,’ but I still didn’t know.”
