XOXO-MG, Kristen Bell Is Going To Narrate The 'Gossip Girl' Reboot
Spotted: A very familiar Bell ringing on the Upper East Side. That's right, the original voice of Gossip Girl is returning to her role as the authority on all of Manhattan's juiciest drama. On Nov. 7, it was announced that Kristen Bell will narrate the Gossip Girl reboot for HBO Max, just like she did for the original CW series.
The original Gossip Girl ran on The CW from 2007 to 2012 and followed the scandalous lives of a group of New York City elite prep school students, as told by the anonymous blogger Gossip Girl (voiced by Bell). HBO Max's reboot is expected to be quite different from the beloved original series, but at least fans will still have their beloved narrator.
"Kristen Bell has always been and will always be the voice of Gossip Girl," Gossip Girl creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage said in a statement.
The HBO Max Gossip Girl reboot series was announced in July as an updated version set eight years after the original. The official logline for the new series reads:
Eight years after the original website went dark, a new generation of New York private school teens are introduced to the social surveillance of Gossip Girl. The prestige series will address just how much social media — and the landscape of New York itself — has changed in the intervening years.
No other original cast members have been announced as part of the reboot cast yet, but Schwartz previously said he's open to including them. During the 2019 TCA press tour, he said, "We’ve reached out to all of them to let them know it was happening, and we would love for them to be involved if they want to be involved. But [we] certainly didn’t want to make it contingent upon their [participation]. They played those characters for six years, and if they felt like they were good with that, we wanted to respect that. But obviously, it would be great to see them again.”
Schwartz also explained that the new Gossip Girl isn't simply retelling the story of the original series. Instead, it's "a continuation of that world," but whatever that will look like in the reboot is yet to be seen.
There's no word yet on when the 10 episodes of the Gossip Girl reboot will premiere, but HBO Max is set to launch in spring 2020.
