The consistency across all of it is professional seriousness. She has not coasted on the cultural capital of Blair Waldorf. She has not repeatedly reproduced Blair Waldorf in variations for audience consumption. She has pursued the work she is interested in doing — the Broadway show, the music she actually wanted to make, the comedy that let her play something different — regardless of whether it was the commercially optimal choice.
This is a specific kind of integrity, and it is the kind that is easier to identify in retrospect than in real time. In real time, a choice like Of Mice and Men on Broadway might look like an odd detour from the obvious path. In retrospect, it looks like a consistent pattern: someone who is always doing the work she is actually interested in doing, regardless of the commercial logic of the choice.
She has continued this pattern into her most recent work. Good Cop/Bad Cop, the 2025 Australian production for which she received a Logie Award nomination — the Australian television industry’s primary recognition award — represents a willingness to work outside the American industry’s specific hierarchies and definitions of success. The nomination is not, in the American entertainment industry’s terms, a major credential. In the terms of the work itself, it is the recognition of a performance that connected with an audience that did not encounter her through Blair Waldorf first.
This matters. The audience that knows her primarily through Good Cop/Bad Cop is encountering a different version of her professional identity than the audience that knows her primarily through Gossip Girl. She is, in each of these contexts, simply the actress doing the work in front of her — which is, in the end, what she has always been.