After a somewhat rocky reception to its first season, HBO’s Gossip Girl reboot returned this December for an equally mixed-reviewed second one. In it, 27-year-old actor Thomas Doherty plays Max: a pansexual lothario-slash-prep schooler in a “throuple” with Evan Mock’s Aki and Emily Alyn Lind’s Audrey. Thomas plays Max somewhere between the musical theatre campiness he summoned for the DCOM Descendants 2 — an aspect of his acting history he’s far from shy about — and the bruising coyness of his crooner character in the Zoë Kravitz-starring High Fidelity series, a performance which inspired a full NY Mag article about how hot he is.
Which, brings us to the core of Max’s plot — the throuple. After spending the first season in a love triangle, the latest follows Max, Aki and Audrey trying their hand at polyamory, in a depiction that has been praised for its nuance. We both live in Brooklyn and are the same age; I point out that while there’s no shortage of queer polyamorous people in our demographic, most 27 year olds I know aren’t mature enough for polyamory, let alone 17 year olds. He agrees. “I’m just not built that way, but some people are very evolved,” Thomas says, laughing. “It’s not my place to pass judgement, because why not go after it?”
But when it comes to Max, Aki and Audrey, not only are these three hormonal teens engaging in the emotional labour of polyamory in a savage prep school environment, they’re also in a queer relationship. Thomas hasn’t shared much about his own sexuality publicly, but he depicts Max in such a casual, natural way, while also navigating a secondary plot line that involves his separating parents, both gay men. “I always find it incredibly liberating to play different characters, and playing Max being pansexual, it makes me look back and question any preconceived notions or ideas that I’ve had about myself, or any conditioning that’s been fed to me from day one,” he says.
Gossip Girl 2.0 is certainly a departure from the original series, whose main cast had no explicitly queer characters, and whose idea of a “throuple” was a heavily-advertised threesome involving Hilary Duff. Nevertheless, the show proved to be a powerfully addictive cultural force. Thomas is unruffled by the enduring nostalgia for the original. He was unaware of it at the time, busy living in Scotland and watching Skins instead.
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That the reboot is less of an all-consuming phenomenon than the original comes as a kind of relief. “I always knew that it wasn’t going to be anywhere near as big as what it was, but it’s still really cool that people still tune in,” the actor says. Regardless of the show’s critical reception, Thomas and the other cast members have been welcomed with warmth into NYC’s micro-influencer milieu. They fit right in. “Minus the billions and millions of dollars,” he quips.
“Nostalgia is a very, very powerful thing, and it’s a scary endeavour to take on something that has been so culturally influential in people’s lives, and to try and do it again,” he says. “I was definitely expecting backlash.” The character from the original series that Max is most often compared to is slimy billionaire-bad-boy Chuck Bass, a beloved yet infamous role played by an actor who’s since been repeatedly accused of sexual assault. However, all Chuck and Max really share is the uniquely Gossip Girl archetype of the sartorially camp, smirking sexpot, played by an actor from the UK — a high schooler with chest hair.
Against a backdrop of series cancellations and removals from HBO Max, that seem to hint at a murky future for the platform, Thomas seems unphased. “In a lot of these projects, a lot of it is commercialised and studios are involved, so they want to sell a product, essentially,” he told Harper’s Bazaar earlier this month. But his breezy approach to the industry also seems well-suited for its mercurial business ways. Either way, he’s engaging in the practised art of collecting the bag. (The actor’s side hustle is audio erotica). It’s no wonder. Unlike the wealthy Manhattanites on Gossip Girl, Thomas worked his way to where he is now, through any number of other odd jobs. I bring up his time as a hotel housekeeper and at a gay bar; he mentions stints washing cars and working at TJ Maxx in his response.
“I mean, when I started Disney, it was my first job. I was 20. I was already more grown [than the cast] when I did it, so I always knew it was a job, and a means of exposure, and trying to get out of Scotland and do more, different jobs that I really wanted to do,” he says. “You give me a job, I’ll turn up, I’ll give you 110 per cent, I’ll be onboard. But when you stop paying me, then it’s over.” Don’t mistake that for lack of gratitude or care. “I’ll never talk bad about any studio or network, I’m so grateful for every opportunity that’s been given to me,” Thomas adds. “I mean, unless they do something terrible. But I’ll never go out of my way to kind of bitch and moan.”
Naturally, the opportunities keep coming. In 2023, Thomas will star in Dandelion alongside KiKi Layne, making a return to musical form. It’s part of the reason Thomas isn’t fazed about how people receive his current gig. “My job is, turn up, do the best I can, and then that’s it. And if you like it, fantastic,” he says, cheeky as ever. “If you don’t, there’s gonna be something else. Come in, don’t worry, don’t fret.”
Credits
Photography Lindsay Perryman