Taylor Momsen said she was bullied “relentlessly” after she was cast as Cindy Lou in How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
“First of all, the Grinch changed my life in a lot of ways — one of them being that they made fun of me relentlessly,” the actress said on Wednesday’s episode of SiriusXM Crushed podcast with Penn Badgley, reports Page six.
Momsen explained to her ex Gossip girl colleague that “making friends has always been challenging” — and the search became daunting when the 2000 Christmas hit movie was released.
“Every time I started a new school or went somewhere else, I don’t think the kids even knew my name. I was just a ‘Grinch girl,’” she recalled.
“Not even a character name, just ‘Grinch Girl.’ I got used to it, but it was alienating.”
The Pretty Reckless frontwoman, 30, described herself as “shy” and “socially awkward” as she explained how she later made friends in high school during a break from acting.
“That was the first [full] the year I was in school, and I had the opportunity to try to make friends,” she said.
“I got the band together. It was my first band, my high school band, my garage band. We could never agree on a name. But after school we would play, and that was always fun. I sang, played the guitar, wrote.”
However, it wasn’t long until Momsen was thrown out of her routine when she was cast as Jenny Humphrey in 2007 Gossip girl when she was 12 years old.
“I was exiled to New York. The band broke up,” the “My Medicine” singer said before joking, “We were big. It was real trouble.”
Two years later, Momsen found herself building her new rock group, The Pretty Reckless.
“I had to restart everything in New York, which didn’t take me that long,” she recalled. “It took me a while to find the right band members… I really wanted to create my own kind of makeshift family,”
Although Momsen admitted that she could have gone ahead as a solo actress, she did not want to be alone in the industry.
“I wanted to be in a band; I wanted to be part of something, not alone. I wanted to be the Beatles, I didn’t want to be Elvis. Who wants to do this alone? I wanted to share it with people,” she continued.
As for her time on the set of the CW series alongside Badgley — who played her older brother, Dan Humphrey — Momsen only appeared on the show for four seasons until she later decided to focus on her music.
At the time, she made the decision to leave the show after spending a lot of her free time working on songs as she felt isolated from her co-stars due to their large age gap.
“There, music became such a comfort to me. Thinking back on my life, it was a place where I could just be – write songs, feel how I feel. I was alone a lot. I didn’t have my own clique,” she explained.
Momsen said Your star, 36, that she didn’t fit in with him or the older cast, including Blake Lively, 36, and Leighton Meester, 37.
“I was a new girl. I was the ‘Grinch girl’. I’ve always been in this weird, isolated world, which I probably partly created myself,” he said Heaven knows – said the singer.
And while Momsen was forced to star in the hit series, the actress recalled the freedom she felt when she decided to leave her job behind and decide for herself.
“Literally, as soon as I got to the age where I could make my own decisions, it was like a click… I woke up one morning and said, ‘Wait a minute. I don’t have to do this?’” she recalled
“’I don’t have to do this second job? Can I just play in my band and tour and write songs? Can I do that?’ Granted, it’s a little more complicated to get off a television show than that, but the answer was yes.”
With her help Gossip girl team, Momsen’s life changed overnight after they arranged for her to be written off the show so she could continue her musical endeavors.
“They really made it possible for me to follow my dream,” she continued, “and I’m forever grateful for that.”
This article originally appeared on Page Six and is reproduced with permission.