“I don’t know how they, or anyone, can do a three-way relationship,” Thomas Doherty laughs. “One person is hard enough!” We’re talking about his character on HBO Max’s Gossip Girl reboot, which has recently returned for its second season. Doherty plays Max Wolfe, a hedonistic, cynical, and damaged teenager who, after sleeping with his schoolteacher (and most men with abs on the Upper East Side), now finds himself in a mixed-gender throuple. Watching Max, Audrey (Emily Alyn Lind), and Aki (Evan Mock) trying to navigate this setup is just as messy as you’d expect.
The original Gossip Girl series, based on the best-selling books by Cecily von Ziegesar, aired on the CW Network between 2007 and 2012. It became a foundational millennial text and turned its cast into teen idols, sparking plenty of parental outrage along the way. The show followed a group of rich teenagers as their complicated, scandalous lives were exposed by Gossip Girl, an anonymous blog that followed their every move. A decade on, the teachers of Constance Billard private school have revived the blog on Instagram in a desperate attempt to keep the next generation of pupils in line. What could possibly go wrong?
Doherty wasn’t a Gossip Girl fan as a teenager, but he did binge-watch several seasons as an adult, when he was filming in Georgia and a former girlfriend visited him on set. “I was bored out of my mind, and she came to visit me. She was on Season 3 or 4, and after she left, I just kept watching it!” he remembers. A month later, his manager called and asked if he wanted to audition for the reboot, which was being brought to HBO by Josh Safran.
Gossip Girl 2.0 is a microcosm of how much TV and wider society have changed in the last decade. It’s now presumed that TV shows will tackle the political topics of the day through a more diverse range of characters. This is especially true when it comes to shows centering on young people. From Euphoria to 13 Reasons Why, the American high school is TV’s new political battleground, reflecting a younger generation who are switched on and engaged. This comes with pressure for an actor like Doherty, but it also suits his frank demeanor. As “pansexual playboy” Max, he’s never far from intense drama and scandal. But off-screen, he’s refreshingly low-key, relaxed, and even a little foulmouthed.
I wonder if Doherty was nervous about joining a show that holds such a special place in the collective millennial memory. “I definitely did have pause,” he admits, before explaining he originally auditioned for the part of Obie Bergmann (Eli Brown). “I thought, ‘Nah, this isn’t for me.’” Max ended up being a much better fit, but there were still nerves. “To be part of a show, which is so nostalgic for people, was exciting, but also daunting,” he says. “Because there’s nothing quite as powerful as nostalgia. It feels like you’re taking on a big responsibility, and you’re destined for a lot of pushback.”
Sure enough, just like the original Gossip Girl, the resistance began before the HBO revival even aired. The show was described as a “woke” reboot, a concept that, according to W Magazine, made millennials “recoil.” It’s true that the HBO show is much more diverse, with characters who march at anti-gentrification protests and say phrases like marginalized communities. These rich kids are well versed in the Canva-designed Instagram infographic language of “checking their privilege,” because, make no mistake, privilege is still the backbone of this show.
Gossip Girl once turned its main characters, like Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf, into influencers in the era just before social media had fully taken off. The new incarnation represents the completion of that prophecy, with characters who already share their lives online, juggling paid partnerships and school. When Gossip Girl—a tale of New York City lore—is brought back from the dead, Insta-fame quickly becomes infamy. In this new, democratized digital terrain, the elite feel vulnerable—not economically, but socially, where they teeter on the edge of cancellation.
The two shows feel most similar when it comes to some of the characters. Doherty’s character, Max, sometimes feels like a queer Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick), the promiscuous (and immaculately tailored) villain-turned-antihero. “There’s a lot of comparisons between Max and Chuck, but I remember saying that he needed to be cheekier, more flirty, but not creepy. A little bit lighter,” Doherty explains. “I say that Max always has a joke in the back of his head that no one else knows.”
Cheeky is a word that describes Doherty just as much as his character. He apologizes to his PR rep in advance (“Don’t kill me!”) when he tells me he isn’t interested in Oscars or awards before swiftly adding, “But if it comes, I’m not going to say no!” Throughout our conversation, he cracks funny (like, actually funny) and self-deprecating jokes at unexpected times. “I can’t believe that so many people give a shit,” he laughs, when I ask him what it’s like to have four million Instagram followers. “I feel like I’m always naked!” he jokes, when I mention how many nude scenes Max finds himself in. He is friendly, too: The first few minutes of our conversation are spent trying to work out if we have any mutual friends, because, coincidentally, we went to neighboring high schools in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the exact same time. (The wider world is just as small as the Upper East Side, it seems.)
Doherty’s upbringing was a stark contrast to the teenage experience we see on Gossip Girl. “When you’re from a place like Edinburgh in Scotland, even the idea of coming to New York and seeing a yellow cab is so alien and romanticized,” he says. Growing up, he “always just knew” he was going to be an actor, he remembers, before apologizing if that sounds arrogant. His early dreams of being rich, famous, and starring in films with Leonardo DiCaprio soon met the slightly less glamorous reality of studying musical theater at an Edinburgh performing arts school.
After he graduated, Doherty worked a lot of odd jobs. He juggled shifts in bars and restaurants, shops, answering phones in a call center, and he even joined a group of Polish immigrant women for a brief stint as a housekeeper. He couldn’t afford to live in London, where most auditions are held, but eventually his first break came when he landed the role of Sean Matthews in The Lodge, a musical drama and mystery television series that premiered on the Disney Channel. This led to a role in Disney’s Descendants 2, a 2017 musical fantasy television film, which he reprised for Descendants 3 two years later. Next came High Fidelity, a 2020 romantic comedy series starring Zoë Kravitz. This underlined his status as one of TV’s new heartthrobs, with The Cut dedicating an entire article to unpacking why, precisely, he is so hot.
Doherty is refreshing to talk to, because he doesn’t speak in gushing terms about everything he’s done as an actor. In fact, sometimes he sounds borderline apologetic about it. “My first thing was Disney, and it kind of got into that field. And once you’re in there, it’s slightly harder to get out,” he explains. “I did start to feel like I wasn’t doing the acting that I always hoped and dreamed for.” We talk about the “Venn diagram,” where, as a creative, the work you really love doesn’t always match up with the work that pays the bills or gets you the most exposure, which makes it even more satisfying on the rare occasions it does. “Just like any career, some people are very lucky, and they can dive straight into careers where they’re doing what they’ve always wanted to do,” he says. “But for the vast majority of people, it’s definitely a stepping-stone thing.”
What’s the next step, then? He has just returned from Kentucky, where he was filming Dandelion, an indie film costarring KiKi Layne, which he describes as the most creatively fulfilling work he’s done. “The next step for me is definitely something that’s a lot more character and acting based, and I know that sounds ridiculous, because I’m an actor!” he laughs. “But in a lot of these projects, a lot of it is commercialized and studios are involved, so they want to sell a product, essentially.”
This frankness is quite typical of Scottish people. Southern English people are more associated with the classic British cliché of tiptoeing around things with flowery language. But a more localized stereotype is that, the further north you go in the United Kingdom, that disappears. Scottish people are more known for getting to the point, swearing, and, occasionally, cutting people down to size. I ask about what his parents think about their son attending fancy events like the Met Gala, being a Dior Beauty ambassador, and having almost as many Instagram followers as the entire Scottish population. “They’re really proud of me,” he says. “But they’re not really a part of that world. They’re like, ‘Go do your thing!’” He laughs in agreement when I say that the Scottish tendency to make fun of anyone who brags about their success probably precludes them from boasting about his achievements.
Gossip Girl has thrown Doherty into a new sphere, too: social media discourse. Max is a queer role, but Doherty has only ever publicly dated women. (He was in a relationship with his Descendents 2 costar Dove Cameron between 2017 and 2020.) He has previously said that he believes sexuality is a “spectrum” and that he isn’t keen on labels. But recently, Harry Styles faced think piece-heavy backlash for making a similar statement while taking on a gay role in the 2022 period romance film My Policeman. A few weeks before our conversation, Kit Connor, star of Netflix’s gay teen drama Heartstopper, tweeted that he felt “forced” to come out publicly as bisexual after being accused of “queerbaiting,” a marketing technique in which entertainers hint at, but do not confirm, queerness in order to profit from LGBTQ+ fans. (Doherty hadn’t heard of Connor, or the story of his coming out, but says it sounds “so sad” when I offer a brief summary.)
I wonder if he was prepared for being asked about his own sexuality in interviews, or if he’s ever worried about saying the wrong thing. “I mean, Twitter’s a fucking open-air asylum, so you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, so I try to stay the fuck away from that,” he says. “But that’s the beautiful thing about being an actor as well, that it opens your mind so much when you’re playing different characters.” And does he ever worry that he will be accused of queerbaiting? “I think, if I know in my heart of hearts that that’s not what I’m doing, or will ever do …” he hesitates, “because it’s hard, isn’t it? One man’s ‘queerbaiting’ is another man tapping into a different part of the spectrum that I think we all inhabit.”
Sometimes, Doherty thinks social media encourages people to go looking for grievances without a proper cause. “For example, this interview,” he pauses, “people will read it and just fucking wait to be angry about something!” But on the flipside, he also thinks it’s “amazing” that young people are so politically educated and that TV is now reflecting different experiences and perspectives. “Prior to social media, we had newspapers and television, which were all controlled by Rupert Murdoch,” he says. “But now, people see more injustice and want to read up on it, and become knowledgeable about it.”
Knowing his words might be dissected, I wonder why Doherty seems quite relaxed talking about discourse-heavy topics. “I guess I’m very confident in my beliefs and who I am. I know I’m never going to say something to hurt someone, or a group of people—ever,” he says, definitively. “Live and let live is the way that I live.” This type of optimism is frequent in his responses—perhaps because as a young actor whose career is on the rise, why wouldn’t he be?
We end our conversation on one such note. “I’m lucky enough to have worked, so I’ve realized that that alone doesn’t make you happy at all,” he says. So what does make him happy, I ask. “I just want to be creatively fulfilled, make cool shit with cool people, and have a roof over my head.”
