How Leonardo DiCaprio Unexpectedly Influenced Gossip Girl

In case the 10-year anniversary of Gossip Girl has you feeling nostalgic for dishy dispatches from the Upper East Side, here’s a juicy real-life scoop about a truly spectacular time in celebrity relationships — a story that concerns one Blake Lively and her former beau Leonardo DiCaprio.

According to a Vanity Fair interview with Gossip Girl executive producer Jonathan Safran, the couple’s high-profile relationship in 2011 included the romantic practice of Lively taking pictures of a doll and sending the photos to DiCaprio, something Safran considers akin to a precursor to Instagram.

“When I think about shooting the L.A. episodes, Blake was dating [DiCaprio] at the time, and she had this thing where she had a doll that she took photos of that she sent to Leo,” Safran said, noting that in this way, DiCaprio had an unexpected influence over the course of the show. “Blake was way ahead of the curve. It was pre-Instagram. She was documenting her life in photographs in a way that people were not yet doing.”

In other non-doll-related news, the interview also revealed that in the most Chuck Bass-like of all moves, Ed Westwick still doesn’t know who Gossip Girl is and that Nate and Eric van der Woodsen were runners-up to be the notorious blogger. In typical sad-boy fashion, Penn Badgley played true to his character and declined to be interviewed for the story.