For Leighton Meester, performing is much like being a kid playing a game. “I’m around kids all the time, and they’re always planning and plotting their games,” the actor, singer, and model tells me on a sunny afternoon. “They might not even get around to playing it, or they get the last five minutes of their play-date to finally play, but it’s all about the planning. It’s like, ‘Okay, my name is Ella, I’m 12, and I go to a school where you have to have a necklace.’ They just play a game that’s filled with details, and everyone’s assigned a part.” When Meester is preparing for a role, she feels quite similarly. “As an adult, you just get to continue that. It’s crazy.”

Meester, dressed casually in a white t-shirt and fuzzy blue cardigan, tells me this from the front seat of her car, parked a few blocks away from her children’s school, where she is waiting to pick them up. The gameplay she refers to can apply to any of the numerous projects she’s been in since getting her start over 25 years ago, but for now, we’re talking about Good Cop/Bad Cop, the CW police procedural she stars in, which just concluded its first season and will premiere on Amazon Prime in May. Much like a game, Meester, who plays the well-meaning but ambitious detective Lou Hickman, was drawn to the project because of the details. “The first script I read, I just was really excited to say the words, basically,” she says. “[Lou is] a character that’s a dream to play because she’s such a fully-formed person on the page.” 

From there, everything else—“the sweeping emotional moments;” “the family dynamics;” “the quirky, silly [elements]”—took shape. That it was filmed on location in Australia over four months helped to solidify the fantasy. “I was really able to get a sense of the character and her whole world,” she says. “It was just the time of my life.”

Meester has been working since childhood. By the time she was 11, she was modeling in Ralph Lauren campaigns shot by photographers like Bruce Weber and Sofia Coppola. By 13, she had booked her first acting gig—on an episode of Law & Order, naturally—before eventually graduating to bigger roles on shows like Tarzan, Entourage, and the Emmy-winning 24.

Her big break, however, came a little later, in 2007, with the debut of Gossip Girl on The CW. A juicy, addicting adaptation of Cecily von Ziegesar’s series of novels about “the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite” (as the opening voiceover so memorably notes), the drama, which ran for six seasons, quickly became an inescapable hit—with Meester, as Blair Waldorf, the daughter of a high-powered fashion designer and a self-appointed “Queen B”—as the show’s breakout character. Though she wasn’t as carefree as Blake Lively’s Serena van der Woodsen, nor as engagingly sociopathic as Penn Badgley’s Dan Humphrey, Meester’s ability to straddle the line between bitchy and tender—she could deliver a withering read in one scene and show up as the world’s most caring friend in another—made her Blair an undeniable fan-favorite.

“It was ultimately what I wanted. It was the goal to be on something that people saw—or, before that, even to just be on something,” Meester says now, recalling how, prior to the steady work provided by Gossip Girl, she relied on sporadic bookings to continue living. “I would be on the verge of thinking, “I don’t know if I can afford to do this.’ But every couple months, I would get a job, and then it was like I could pay rent and continue to audition until the next thing.”

Nevertheless, certain elements were harder to adjust to. The show’s success quickly shot its core cast of glamorous 20-somethings into the upper stratas of fame, turning them into the toast of the town, much like the fictional characters they embodied on screen. “I don’t think I prepared or understood it,” Meester admits about the sudden fame. “There was so much in my personal life coloring how I felt about that point in time that had nothing to do with my work or career.”

She wasn’t alone, though. The show led to some lifelong friendships that she still holds dearly. It’s why, when her co-star Michelle Trachtenberg died earlier this year at 39 years-old (the same age as Meester), the news hit so hard. “It’s devastating,” she sighs. “She was a wonderful, talented person, and everyone loved her. It’s very, very sad for everyone who knew her.” Still, she looks back on that crucial career moment warmly. “Now, I can see that [the show’s legacy] continues—in some ways, even more so than back then—to live on, which is incredible.”

In the dozen or so years since Gossip Girl has been off air, as Meester has left her 20s (and most of her 30s) behind, she feels like she is “the same in many ways.” The actress has continued working—on television and in film; in a play on Broadway; and as a singer, with a widely beloved solo album, Heartstrings, under her belt—but everything pales in comparison to what she considers her most significant life development: starting a family.

Back in 2014, Meester married fellow actor Adam Brody after dating for less than a year. The following year, the notoriously private pair—neither of whom is a stranger to high-profile relationships—gave birth to their first child, Arlo, and five years later, they welcomed their second, a son, whose name they have decided to keep a secret.

“I mean, that’s the ultimate,” Meester grins emphatically while discussing her quaint family of four. “I’m really happy that I have children. They’re the best, they’re all that matters to me.” They’ve even changed her outlook on work. “Having kids forces you, in a good way, to look within, and that only helps professionally.” While she insists that her children “don’t figure into my profession at all,” she does confess that having them “gives me so much perspective of my own self, of my own upbringing and my childhood and young adulthood. It’s also just broadened and cracked open my capacity to understand what love is and what life is for.”

This viewpoint has kept her grounded during periods of strife—such as the last few months following the Palisades wildfires, which ravaged a huge swathe of southern California and destroyed many homes, her own included. When I broach the subject, wondering how she’s been adjusting to a new normal, Meester gets a little quiet. “I don’t know. I don’t have the answer,” she eventually responds, her voice now in a notably lower register. She considers herself “really so lucky and thankful for the support” she’s had but maintains that “it’s impossible to try to comprehend” everything. “I see LA, where I live, and I want it to thrive and do well and survive—and I know it will. But it’s not a one-day event that ended. It’s ongoing…It’s a roller coaster because sometimes it’s all right, and then, sometimes, there are moments that are harder. The best thing I can do is just take it one step at a time. There are so many people who are in this position, so that’s not a positive. But that being said, I am not alone.”

Hollywood can be an isolating place, but Meester considers herself fortunate to be able to sometimes work with family. Such is the case with Nobody Wants This, the SAG and Golden Globe-nominated Netflix hit that stars Kristen Bell as an agnostic podcast host and Meester’s husband as the Jewish rabbi she unexpectedly falls in love with. Earlier this year—a couple weeks after Brody took home the Critics Choice Award for his swoon-worthy performance—Meester joined the cast for its currently-filming, highly-anticipated second season, playing Abby, a middle school nemesis of Bell’s character who now works as an Instagram mommy influencer.

Joining the show felt like wish-fulfillment for the actor—not just because she was already a fan (she praises show creator Erin Foster’s “specific and funny” voice and admits that Bell and Brody’s “chemistry is so good, it’s just the perfect lightning in a bottle”), but also because working alongside her husband is always welcomed (she and Brody watched the entire first season together). “I love working with him. I just love hanging out with him,” she gushes. Though the pair have worked together on a number of projects—2011’s The Oranges; 2014’s Life Partners; and most recently, 2023’s River Wild—they have never actually played love interests. (“I wonder if that’ll happen, what that’ll be all about,” Meester jokes.) Still, she relishes any chance to be on set with him. “I mean, he’s my best friend and working with him is just like working with my best friend. When I get the opportunity to work with friends, I prefer that far more than any other circumstance. I think it’s the most fun to work with friends.”

And the friendship homecoming doesn’t stop with Brody. Meester notably worked with the “fun, easygoing” Bell for a few episodes of the mid-aughts teen detective sensation Veronica Mars; she also joined Life Partners after Bell was forced to pull out because of a pregnancy. In a way, the pair’s careers have almost been like a series of double-dates. “I’ve worked with [Bell’s] husband [Dax Shepard, on 2014’s The Judge], and then Adam worked with her husband [on 2017’s CHIPS],” she says. “We’ve worked in each other’s worlds many times over the years.”

So, perhaps, it’s not a surprise that she found “a lot of fun energy on set.” She beams, “It was just really fun to play with everyone.” Despite some gentle prodding, she is careful not to spoil any major details about what’s to come, but she does promise that the nemesis aspect between her and Bell’s characters “is a really funny dynamic that I very much enjoyed playing with her.”

Soon after production wraps on Nobody Wants This, Meester will be returning to set for Untitled Rachel Sennott Project (title pending), the upcoming HBO comedy created by and starring rising comedienne Rachel Sennott. Expected to be a Girls for the Zillennial generation, the series “follows a group of codependent friends who reunite after some time apart, navigating how the separation, ambition, and new relationships have changed them,” according to a logline.

Meester is not allowed to discuss her role just yet, but the actress excitedly tells me that she “felt magic” and “honestly had such a blast” while filming the pilot last summer. “[Rachel is] brilliant and funny and so cool to work with,” she effuses. When she describes the rest of the cast—which includes Jordan Firstman, Quenlin Blackwell, Odessa A’zion, and True Whitaker—as “just a dream come true,” I can’t help but wonder whether working with this group of buzzy young Hollywood starlets, all of whom seem like they are on the precipice of breakout stardom, reminded her of her similar experience working on Gossip Girl. “I actually hadn’t thought about that,” she responds. “I can only speak for myself, but working with this cast and seeing them in their careers, [they seem] much more mature and capable and confident than I felt at that time.”

Of course, much has changed since those Gossip Girl days—and as time has gone on, Meester has honed in on what, exactly, she wants out of her career. Asked what she’d like to do next, she confidently replies, “What I’ve been enjoying is having different experiences.” She is quick to bring up the upcoming second season of The Buccaneers, Apple TV+’s Gilded Age-set period drama based on Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel, in which she has a recurring role, as an example. “Just aesthetically, entering that world, it’s a fantasy, with the corsets and the costumes and the silly little hats and castles and gardens,” she exclaims. “I was in the back of a horse-drawn carriage, going down this beautiful grassy road and just squealing like a kid!”

“There couldn’t be anything more different from [something like] Good Cop/Bad Cop and The Buccaneers,” she continues. “But I think that’s why I enjoyed [The Buccaneers] so much, because it’s offering such a different challenge and different escape for me.”

It’s this exact impulse that has Meester pushing for opportunities beyond the screen, as well. “While I was doing Of Mice and Men, I was like, ‘This is the most challenging and fulfilling and just life-altering experience,’” she tells me, fondly recalling her first (and to date, only) experience on Broadway, playing Curley’s Wife in the 2014 revival of John Steinbeck’s Tony-nominated play. Though she acknowledges that the 15-week engagement was “totally difficult in so many ways,” she also reveals that she can’t help but 

to “compare a lot of things to that experience.” With a sense of pride, she says, “It helped me so much. I would love to do that again.”

And for those people—myself included—who have been anxiously awaiting new music from the singer behind hits like the Robin Thicke-featuring “Somebody to Love” and Cobra Starship’s perennial aughts hit “Good Girls Go Bad,” Meester has good news. “Music, I really want to continue with that. I really want to keep doing it,” she stresses. “I really do still enjoy playing and writing and singing, and I want to eventually, again, put out an album.” But don’t get too impatient; she’s not booking studio time just yet. “There are no specifics that I can offer because I don’t have them,” she lets off with a chuckle. “As soon as I do, boy will I tell you!”

In the meantime, the actor is happy to keep taking it day by day, doing her work and spending time with her family. “I love that I’ve been lucky enough to continue doing it, which is mind-boggling,” she says of her long career. “I’m obviously biased, but I just enjoy it so much. It gives me a sense of self, and it always has.” 

So, whether she’s hanging out in between takes on projects with her husband or working herself to the bone on stage, Meester is still determined to always find the joy in everything. After all, for her, performance is just one big, extended childhood game.

Photographed by Amber Asaly at Abstract Management

Styled by Alexus Shefts

Written by Michael Cuby

Hair: Dallin James at The Wall Group

Makeup: Bethany McCarty at Nest Artists

Lighting: Max Gray Wilbur

Flaunt Film: Jonathan Ho

Flaunt Film Editor: Roberto De Jesus 

Flaunt Film Music: Lucas Nevada Long 

Photo Assistant: Jayden Thomas

Production Assistant: Ethan Schlesinger

Location: Petit Ermitage

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