Penn Badgley Revealed There Was ‘Not Enough Separation’ Between Him & Ex Blake Lively on Gossip Girl—See Who the You Star Is Married to Now

Domino Kirke (2014-Present)

Badgley and his wife, Domino Kirke, met in 2014 and married in 2017, so the actor has been off the market for quite a while. Their wedding was a casual courthouse wedding, though they did have an intimate rustic-themed wedding reception, and then apparently another one, which was filled with celebrity friends.

Kirke is the daughter of Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke and Lorraine Kirke, who ran the Lower East Side vintage store, Geminola. Her sisters are both actresses, Jemima Kirke and Lola Kirke. Domino is the oldest of the trio, and a singer who has released two LPs. The two apparently met at a meatball shop, as Badgley had been couch surfing, and Kirke had a room available. “I got his number because I was really interested in him living with me, and I thought he was cute,” Kirke revealed during a 2022 interview on her husband’s Podcrushed podcast. “And it would have been nice to have a little winter, you know, fling with my roommate.”

“I had never seen Gossip Girl, so I had no context for Penn.” The rest, as they say, is history.

The two have two kids. Cassius, who is Kirke’s son from a previous relationship, and James. The couple is also expecting twins.

Zoë Kravitz (2011-2013)

Badgley dated actress Zoë Kravitz from 2011 to 2013, even referring to their relationship at one point as “real, true, earth-shattering love” in an interview with Movieline.

He also spoke about being in love while talking about the movie Greetings From Tim Buckley, at the time while he was dating Kravitz, saying, “At that time, I was falling madly in love in a way that was changing me and opening me up. I was kind of going through what Jeff [Buckley] was going through emotionally in the movie in the sense that the worlds of music and love and women and art were opening up to me. Honestly, I needed it. It was like this cosmic intervention where, if you’re going to play somebody like Jeff, you’ve got to at least be in love, you know?”

There’s no real information on how the two met or why the two broke up, as Badgley has always kept the details of his relationships private.

Blake Lively (2007-2010)

Badgley and Lively reportedly dated early on during the filming of Gossip Girl, though it’s hard to tell how long they really dated and when they broke up, because they kept the secret about their breakup from everyone and remained professional until the end of the show’s run, in 2012. In fact, the show’s EP, Joshua Safran let it slip in 2017 that Badgley and Humphrey broke up a long while before the news became public knowledge in 2010.

“I found out on the set of the Season 2 finale [in 2009] that Blake and Penn had broken up months before,” he told Vanity Fair. “They kept the breakup hidden from the crew, which you could never do now. I don’t even know how they did it. They kept it from everybody, which is a testament to how good they are as actors. Because they did not want their personal drama to relate to the show.”

About their relationship, Badgley told Elle in 2013, “We were very much caught up in the show, which itself was a six-year endurance test. Our relationship was a part of that and helped us through it. I mean, like anything valuable, it was good and it was bad, and it was a learning experience.”

Badgley also spoke about “the struggle” of dating a costar during an appearance on the April 23 edition of the Call Her Daddy podcast. Speaking in general about dating a co-star, and specifically Lively, the only co-star he’s dated, he said, “I mean, that’s a great question because it was the struggle.“When you do a television show, you’re doing it constantly.”

He added, “What starts to happen when you’re in this one role for a long time — the aspect of celebrity being a part of it, a huge part of it — there is not enough separation, I think, for anybody,” adding, “You’re seen as this person, you’re called their name out on the street. You also constantly have to be that person at work.”