There’s a common thread running through Gossip Girl, Edith Wharton, and Apple TV+’s The Buccaneers. The hit mid-aughts soap contained more than a few
There’s a common thread running through Gossip Girl, Edith Wharton, and Apple TV+’s The Buccaneers. The hit mid-aughts soap contained more than a few nods to the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist from New York City’s Gilded Age; The Buccaneers is based on Wharton’s incomplete posthumous book of the same name. Yet Leighton Meester, who has joined the show’s second season in a guest role that’s steeped in family drama, is hesitant to agree that this is a full-circle moment.
“It’s not really for me to say,” says Meester. “I don’t know. I think the audience is the one who can really make those judgements.”
Still, Meester jumped at the chance to do her first period drama. She grew up watching Martin Scorsese’s 1993 adaption of Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: “It informed everything for me, actually, as far as romance and filmmaking and unrequited love and that time period. It’s always been intriguing and comforting, and I’ve always loved it, but also Edith Wharton and that world that she captures.”
Though she hadn’t watched season one of The Buccaneers before signing on for season two, she was “hooked” once she did. She joins the ensemble cast—which includes Christina Hendricks, Kristine Froseth, and Mia Threapleton—as Nell, a woman with a secret. In the first season, Nan (Froseth) discovers that her biological mother isn’t Patricia St. George (Hendricks). But we don’t learn who her biological mom is until the first episode of the second season: Enter Nell, played by Meester.
In this exclusive clip, we see Nell and Patricia’s awkward reunion, which comes after decades in which they didn’t speak. It’s at Nan’s wedding, making things all the more dicey for their long-kept secret.
“We knew we wanted Nell to be feisty,” says series creator Katherine Jakeways, a British comedian, actor, and radio and television writer. “She’s no pushover. And we wanted to really care about her, to understand why she gave Nan up, and for that relationship to be as complicated as all relationships are in The Buccaneers. People making bad decisions doesn’t necessarily make them bad people—it makes them human. And we wanted Nell to be funny and brave and nuanced and aspirational, just like Nan is. So we started to plot for Leighton. She’s an icon. And she was our absolute dream casting from the start.”
Meester was thrilled to take on Nell, in part because she and the character are so different.
“Her advice isn’t necessarily advice I would give,” she says. “The way she conducts herself or how she enters any given situation—in particular towards the end of the series—isn’t what I would do. But I am living in this time period. I kept on going back to thinking about my own life, my own children, and being a mother. I think that it’s universal and timeless to have an understanding about all of humanity and a mother’s deep, unbreakable love for their children.” The Buccaneers, Meester says, gives “the gift of hindsight to these women—the dignity they deserved in their time.”
While the first season of The Buccaneers focused on an extraordinarily pretty, vivacious, and wealthy set of youthful women trying to find their place in the world, the second season brings in a few more stern plot lines—and more than a few threads about motherhood in all its forms. From Nell and Nan’s complicated reunion to Jinny’s postpartum struggles and efforts to free herself from an abusive husband, the show feels more grounded even as it continues to drag out several will-they-won’t-they arcs.
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