‘Gossip Girl’ reboot casts newcomer Savannah Smith in HBO Max series

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When HBO Max announced it was working on a reboot of Gossip Girl, we didn’t have high hopes for diversity considering the original was seriously lacking in that department. It turns out, the lead in the reboot will be played by a lovely new actress named Savannah Smith.

The brown-skinned beauty is currently a student at NYU’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts and the reboot will be her big break into Hollywood. She has been excitedly been posting about her new gig on Instagram.

According to Shadow and Act, Smith will play a lead role as part of the school’s in-crowd. She’s not the only Black face we’ll see when the series hits HBO Max because Whitney Peak has nabbed a role as well.

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Other confirmed cast members include Emily Alyn Lind, Tavi Gevinson, Eli Brown, Johnathan Fernandez, Jason Gotay. Thomas Doherty, Adam Chanler-Berat and Zion Moreno.

“This time around the leads are nonwhite,” the show’s executive producer, Joshua Safran said in a statement.

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“There will also be a lot of queer content on this show. It is very much dealing with the way the world looks now, where wealth and privilege come from, and how you handle that.”

The original Gossip Girl was a huge hit for the CW from 2007-2012 and followed the lives of super spoiled teenagers wreaking havoc on the Upper East Side of NYC. The new iteration will pick up focus on this new diverse generation and how technology has changed how they interact and of course, gossip according to the teaser:

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.

The debut is set for May with Kristen Bell reprising her role as the narrator of the series.