Meet the new cast of HBO Max's Gossip Girl sequel series

Spotted: The Upper East Side's newest notables have been revealed.

EW has confirmed that Emily Alyn Lind (Code Black, Doctor Sleep), Whitney Peak (The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), Johnathan Fernandez (Lethal Weapon), Eli Brown (Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists), and Jason Gotay (NY City Center's revival of Evita) have been cast in HBO Max's Gossip Girl sequel series. These five actors are joining Kristen Bell, who will voice the snarky titular character/narrator as she did in the original CW series.

Following the initial announcement of the casting news, reboot showrunner/executive producer Joshua Safran, who worked on the CW series, welcomed them with a tweet, saying "Hello to all these wonderful human beings," while adding a special shoutout to Whitney Peak, "cause she was cast first and has been keeping the secret all this time!"

Set eight years after Dan Humphrey's Gossip Girl website shutdown, the 10-episode reboot follows a brand new generation of New York private school teens as they're thrown under the microscope of Gossip Girl's social surveillance. The continuation promises to explore how much social media and New York City has changed since the iconic series went off the air in 2012.

Lind will play Audrey, who is starting to wonder if there's something better out there than her current, long term relationship. At the moment, there aren't any other details about the other four characters.

"It is very much dealing with the way the world looks now, where wealth and privilege come from, and how you handle that," said Safran at 2019 Vulture Fest in Los Angeles. "The thing I can’t say is there is a twist, and that all relates to the twist."

Safran also hopes the continuation will feature more diversity, in terms of its cast and the storytelling. "There was not a lot of representation the first time around on the show,” he said. "I was the only gay writer I think the entire time I was there. Even when I went to private school in New York in the ’90s, the school didn’t necessarily reflect what was on Gossip Girl. So, this time around the leads are nonwhite. There’s a lot of queer content on this show."

The CW's Gossip Girl co-creators Joshua Schwartz and Stephanie Savage will also executive produce the HBO Max show alongside Leslie Morgenstein and Gina Girolamo of Alloy Entertainment. Fake Empire's Lis Rowinski serves as co-executive producer.

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