As the first season of “Gossip Girl” came to an end in 2008, there were rumors that the on-screen couple were actually dating in real life. They initially denied these rumors, with Blake Lively telling People, “everybody always tries to dig into your personal life or create things that aren’t there … it’s silly.” At the time, she said the most important thing to her was, “to keep [the] core people around me that know the truth about everything.”

But once they were spotted kissing off the “Gossip Girl” set during a vacation in Mexico (via People), the couple confirmed that they were, in fact, an item. While they didn’t really talk about their relationship at the time, Penn Badgley fondly reminisced about their time together during an Actor on Actor segment for Variety in 2020 (via YouTube). Speaking to “Gossip Girl” co-star Chace Crawford, he distinctly remembered a date he had with Lively at The Palace (one of the show’s landmarks), as well as Lively giving him his first iPhone.

“I didn’t even want it. Blake got me that. … I was like, ‘I don’t want this thing. It’s so cumbersome and it has all these apps,'” he said. Lively had to explain everything to him, including the “bird thing” that was Twitter. “Explaining it to me was such a foreign concept,” Badgley noted.