The luck she identifies is partly structural — she happened to be a photogenic child at the right moment for an agent to notice, she happened to land in audition rooms at the right moments, she happened to encounter the Gossip Girl casting process when she was ready for it. And it is partly relational — she has said she was “really lucky” to find and keep friends who were genuinely loyal, who remained real rather than becoming interested primarily in what her celebrity represented. In the specific environment of a major network drama at the height of its cultural visibility, this is a form of luck that is harder to come by than it might appear.
She has described the risk of that environment with a specificity that is worth attending to: “A lot more people were suddenly around and I was being looked at.” The passivity of “was being looked at” is precise. She did not suddenly find herself looking at things differently; the world found her and brought its looking with it, and she had to figure out what to do with the attention while not being equipped, by virtue of age and experience, to fully calibrate it.
The calibration she managed was, by most accounts, more successful than average. She did not become a tabloid fixture. She did not publicly implode. She maintained a professional trajectory that, while not matching the specific altitude of the Gossip Girl years in any single subsequent project, has been consistent and varied and has produced a body of work that spans television, film, stage, and music across nearly three decades of professional activity.