☆Sharing History: Inside Leighton Meester and Adam Brodys Super-Private Love Story☆

Sharing History: Inside Leighton Meester and Adam Brody's Super-Private Love Story
It was O.C. boy meets GG girl when Adam Brody and Leighton Meester finally got together—and quickly decided the on-display life wasn't for them.
Adam Brody, Leighton Meester
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
Beach community boy-next-door with the soul of an artist meets impeccably dressed New York City socialite, and they fall madly in love? As they say, opposites attract!
Or, we may be confusing the characters Adam Brody and Leighton Meester played on their respective star-making teen dramas, but the end result is the same.
Now parents of two, the actors married in 2014 and have been together for a decade since their romance first blossomed, all that had come before paving the way for their future as a meant-to-be couple.
But while their pairing obviously attracted all the OMFG attention you'd imagine, Brody and Meester decided that they were—ongoing work in movies and TV aside—going to live their best lives off-camera. Far, far away from cameras, in fact.

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"She's more inherently private than I am," Brody admitted to GQ in 2019. "I don't seek publicity but if I'm sitting next to you on the subway, I'll tell you everything about me. We're homebodies. We don't go to a lot of things that perhaps we could, and don't seek out promotion in that way. I'm not sh-tting on anyone who monetizes that aspect of their life because I get it. But we've found this great balance so far that really works for us. We're also not very active on social media."

Brody is only on Twitter and, at his wife's suggestion, he's limited his scrolling time to 30 minutes since the 2020 election. "I can still do as much NPR as I want and my blood pressure's stable," he said on the March 29 episode of the podcast Anna Faris Is Unqualified. Instagram "intrigues me, but I know these are Pandora's box and once I go I won't come back."

Meester is on Instagram, but aside from the occasional post that acknowledges the man in her life—such as a red carpet shot of her and Brody ("Me and my hero") at the premiere of his 2019 thriller Ready or Not—it's a zone largely reserved for promoting work, good causes, food, memes and pretty pics of the actress and her friends.

Leighton Meester, Sebastian Stan
Hellmuth Dominguez/PacificCoastNews.com
"In this world, everyone wants to know everything about you, and I think that's funny," Meester, who's celebrating her 35th birthday April 9, told Cosmopolitan in 2009, musing about the object of fascination she'd become since taking on the role of Blair Waldrof on the CW's soapy, sexy Gossip Girl. "I can't be annoyed. People speculate a lot about me, saying there's something else that's really the truth..."

"Maybe I'm just too boring," she suggested.

More like she dropped too few bread crumbs for people to really get a read on what she was up to behind the scenes. At the time she was dating Sebastian Stan, who had joined Gossip Girl for an arc as Upper East Side troublemaker Carter Baizen. The native Texan, whose own biopic-ready story started when she was born while her mom was serving a prison sentence for drug trafficking ("I could've turned out a lot worse," Meester quipped), wouldn't talk about her boyfriend specifically. But she did note that she didn't care for bad boys in real life.

Understandably.  

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"I think the term is stupid," she explained. "A guy who cheats on you or is not nice to you? What is that?"

"Nowadays," Meester added, "I'm much more mature in relationships. I've let go of the bullshit. I think more about the deal makers than the deal breakers. I want a guy I can look up to."

And no, she wouldn't reveal if she was in love right that minute, but thanks for checking. 

"I haven't been in a lot of relationships, but I've been in love," she shared. "There's an inexplicable chemistry. You just really, really want to, like, stare at the person. I've never fallen in love right off the bat. I get scared to say 'I love you' too soon because it means so much. It means you're not seeing an end to things."

Frankly, she had never not seen an end.

She told British Glamour later that year, "My problem is, I lose interest. Every time I've fallen in love, it's just momentary." Putting it even more bluntly, she added, "Honestly, I've hated every boyfriend I've had." Moreover, she didn't want to have any boyfriend, she said, if she didn't see a possibility of forever and, so far, forever hadn't been in the cards.

Gossip Girl Couples, Leighton Meester, Hugo Becker
The CW
Maybe not surprisingly then, her relationship with Stan only lasted for so long—but at least it sounds as if the future Winter Soldier warmed her heart while it lasted. Meester told Seventeen toward the end of 2010, "I've never really liked anybody before. Even when I would date guys, it would sort of be on the surface and it was always a relief when we broke up."

Without naming names, she added, "I've only had one experience where it was really hard and I was really sad when it ended, but that's what taught me a lot about myself and love and life—and that's good."

And she was certainly open to trying again, saying, "If I shut love down or didn't let it in, I would just be this really cold, sad person."

Adam Brody, Rachel Bilson, The O.C., Tv's First Times 
Fox
Meanwhile, over on the West Coast, Brody was picking up roles in films such as In the Land of Women, Jennifer's Body and The Romantics since concluding his four-season run as nice guy Seth Cohen on The O.C.

The San Diego, Calif., native also found love on set, dating co-star Rachel Bilson off and on for several years. But by the time Seth and Summer Cooper tied the knot in the series' 2007 finale, Bilson and Brody had reverted to just friends off-screen. 

Waxing philosophic about his own views on love, he told Anna Faris on her podcast that surely he thought he was in love with his fifth-grade girlfriend who broke up with him after a week, resulting in utter heartbreak, so he didn't put too much pressure on the word itself.

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"As you get older and obviously you know someone more, you know more of the facets of them," Brody explained. "And more than that, you share a history. That's also what I think differentiates you with someone. 'Cause there's lots of people who you might be compatible with on this earth, but it's also like the history and the life you share together that adds up to your love, not just them, specifically and only them. It's what you've done together, be it kids, be it family, be it inside jokes. I mean, you can take the love out of it and say best friends, too, but it's how well you know each other and all the things you share, not just everything that makes this person DNA. It's the act of sharing a life with someone."

He and Meester managed to check all those boxes for each other, Brody being the one with whom the possibilities were endless.

And though it would be several years before they paired off for good, 2007—the year The O.C. ended and Gossip Girl's six-season run began—was when they first met. And at least one of them remembers.

Leighton Meester, Adam Brody, Tony Awards
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions
"Josh Schwartz produced both shows and literally the first time we met, that whole cast was eating at Canter's and I lived at Canter's for like my entire 20s," he told Faris, name-checking a famed Los Angeles deli. "And I was leaving, and he introduced all of us."

Their young-Hollywood paths crossed here and there, Brody recalled, but he never spent much time with her until they were both cast in the romantic-dramedy ensemble of The Oranges, which started filming in New Jersey in March 2010.

"I was very attracted to her from jump," the Promising Young Woman actor said with a laugh. "She's a heavenly creature...But I had no idea whether she was a good person or not. And in fact, kind of assumed she probably wasn't for, like, the first handful of years that I didn't know her, just 'cause, I don't know, Gossip Girl?"

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Not that he didn't already know from experience that actresses could be perfectly nice people ("I never believe that stigma") and that the whole point of acting is usually that you're not the person you play onscreen, but as he said, he didn't know her.

"I thought she was gorgeous," Brody added, "and even when we did the movie there was chemistry there, but I was seeing someone. And I was like, 'Oh, she's cool,' but I still didn't know."

They finally started seeing each other about a year later, once he was single again.

"But I still didn't know [what Meester was really like], and that continued even to when we first started dating," he explained.

Ironically, while Meester had said that she was looking for a good guy she could "look up to," Brody ended up finding someone that he could look up to, as well.

Because when he did finally get to know his future wife, he said, he realized "she's literally like Joan of Arc. She is the strongest, best person I know. She is my moral compass and North Star, and I just can't say enough good things about her character. It's crazy. She's the kind of person who, even as a 4 year old, she would've been perfect. And nobody has a bad thing to say about her."

Adam Brody, Leighton Meester
Todd Williamson/Getty Images
"She's never been rude to like a single person in her life, except—and I give her credit for this—paparazzi, where I'm too self-conscious," he continued. "I wouldn't say rude, but, like, people will try to get her to sign some sexy old photo or something that aren't fans but they pretend to be fans... I, just out of self-consciousness, I'm like, 'Oh, I need them to like me so I'll just do it,' but she has no problem being like, 'You can hate me. I don't care.' But if you're a person who's genuine, no genuine person has a single bad thing to say about her."

They've avoided too many of those awkward scenarios by being extraordinarily private with their time, not splash