Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples that give us hope for our own romantic futures and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.
Leighton Meester and Adam Brody have been through it recently, counting among the first public figures to lose their home in the Los Angeles wildfires. Yet the couple, who quietly married in 2014 and share two young children, have otherwise enjoyed a largely low-key life together despite their outsize impact on pop culture in their respective, teen imagination-sparking ’00s TV shows (Brody, as the mixtape master and Chrismukkah-coining Seth in The O.C.; Meester, as Gossip Girl’s hairbanded terror Blair Waldorf).
Indeed, Friday night’s Critics Choice Awards marked their first major outing since the devastating loss of their house—but there, hearteningly, Brody picked up his first award for best actor in a comedy series for his performance as Noah in Netflix’s Nobody Wants This.
“My darling, darling, darling wife,” Brody said onstage, as the camera panned around to a teary-eyed Meester blowing him a kiss. “Thank you for sharing this life with me and this journey with me. Thank you for our family. Love you with all my heart. Thank you so much.”
Then, when he descended from the stage, he embraced Meester in the kind of passionate snog that needs an almost-euphoric emo vocal swoop by way of Deathcab for Cutie.
X content
It was only seven months after The O.C.’s absolutely wild finale that its creator, Josh Schwartz, took a swing at the teen TV behemoth once again with Gossip Girl. Like their West Coast predecessors, the riotous Upper East Siders of GG took us on a journey through the peaks and troughs of teenage lust and romance, broken and repaired and patched-up-again friendships, dysfunctional families, and the painful efforts to fit in. As a later-generation devotee to both myself, Brody and Meester’s union, of lonely boy and queen bee, was a match made in angsty adolescent heaven. It’s fun to revel in the fantasy of a Seth and Blair meeting; of Seth pulling B out of a soulless loft party to real talk and make out to OK Go.
In a 2019 interview with GQ, Brody was asked whether he thought it was strange that he and Meester ended up together. “It’s not bizarre. To be perfectly honest, it was a little embarrassing,” he said. “I guess love knows no bounds?” Not that either of them really speak about their Seth-Blair situation, as confirmed by Meester to Entertainment Tonight in 2017.
“It’s good for a laugh. It doesn’t excite us, I think, because we’re just human beings…But it’s exciting to us that it’s exciting to you. It’s cool,” Meester said. So no, they’re not slow-dancing to “Lack of Color” or taking a way down the memory lane/boardwalk. But they’re happy we’re happy for them.
As I’ve said, Brody and Meester are a relatively low-profile couple, but when they do step out together, act on the same projects, or reference each other, it’s clear they’re always, always on each other’s teams. “We’re each other’s biggest fans,” Brody told The Hollywood Reporter last year.
Giving probably the most in-depth statement he ever has about their relationship on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast last September, Brody noted their fruitful working relationship. “Everything is run through each other,” he said. “We are each other’s managers…We are in each other’s shit in that way.” He described Meester as “charmingly aloof to the business. She will literally not know Seth Rogen’s name, you know what I mean?... It’s fucking great, because it doesn’t diminish her art. That’s not where she’s focusing, and so she has that outsider quality, and she can come in, but she’s such an artist.”
An obvious romantic and man in awe—as he should be!—he calls her illuminating, a “poet.” Marina and Ulay, Lauren and Humphrey, Leighton Meester and Adam Brody.
With more on the horizon for them both (Nobody Wants This will be returning for a second season; Meester is set to appear in Rachel Sennott’s very buzzy but as yet untitled HBO series), it’s clear the couple are hardy to weather another era of household fame—soundtracked by Phantom Planet or otherwise.
