Kaylee DeFer Explains Why It Was an Interesting Time Joining 'Gossip Girl'

Gossip Girl’s Ivy Dickens, played by Kaylee DeFer, was the show villain we all loved to hate because of her late arrival on the Upper East Side.

“It was a very interesting situation for me because I came in at the end of season 4,” DeFer, 38, recalled during a recent appearance on the “Don’t Worry About It” podcast. “So, imagine going into your senior year of high school with this one class that’s been together for four years and they’ve already all dated each other and broken up with each other and don’t want anything to do with one another.”

DeFer, on the flip slide, was “just so excited to have a job.”

“There’s just, like, ‘Get out of here’ [and] I’m like, ‘Please talk to me,’” DeFer added. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know anyone in New York. Wanna hang out?’ And they’re like, ‘No, we’re not babysitting.’”

DeFer further stressed that the entire cast was all “very nice” to her but treated the experience “like a job.”

Gossip Girl, adapted from Cecily Von Ziegesar’s YA book series of the same name, aired on The CW between 2007 and 2012. Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, Chace Crawford, Ed Westwick, Penn Badgley and Taylor Momsen played students at the elite Constance Billard and St. Jude’s preparatory academies on NYC’s Upper East Side.

As the teens navigated high-society life at a young age, they also lived and breathed to be featured on the “Gossip Girl” blog that was (spoiler alert) run by Badgley’s Dan Humphrey. DeFer, for her part, arrived in town during season 4 as the presumed cousin of Lively’s Serena Van der Woodsen.

After Ivy infiltrated her way into the elite society, it was eventually revealed that she was hired by Serena’s aunt Carol (Sheila Kelley) as a way to secure her inheritance. Carol’s real daughter, Lola (Ella Rae Peck), did not want anything to do with her mother or the UES world as she studied acting in college.

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Regardless of the cast’s feelings, DeFer still had nothing but fond memories of acting on Gossip Girl. She noted on the October podcast episode that show creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage wrote the role of Ivy specifically for her after they worked together on The Mountain.

“They were just the loveliest,” DeFer gushed. “They were like, ‘Kaylee, where have you been? We forgot about you!’ I’m like, ‘I know I haven’t worked in three years.’ And then [they] were like, ‘We want to work with you; we loved working with you on The Mountain.’ And they brought me on board, which was the sweetest thing in the whole world [and] literally saved my life — and I stayed in the industry for another five years.”