Taylor Momsen has opened up about her role in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which saw the Grinch get teased in school, and how something similar happened in her own life as a child.
During the latest episode of SiriusXM’s Podcrushed podcast, the Gossip Girl actress, who played Cindy Lou Who in the movie starring Jim Carrey, told hosts Penn Badgley, Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari, “The Grinch changed my life in a multitude of ways — one of them being I was made fun of relentlessly.”
“Every time I would start a new school or go somewhere else, I don’t even think the kids knew my name. I was just Grinch Girl,” she added. “Not even the character name [Cindy Lou Who], just Grinch Girl.”
Momsen admitted that while she “got used to it” over time, it still “was alienating.”
The musician was just 7 years old when she filmed the Dr. Seuss movie, and she said that moving around to different schools as a child due to her career didn’t help with teasing from her classmates. But once she got to middle school, and her life became more stationary, Momsen said she was able to develop a friend group.
“That was the first year…where I was in school, and I had the opportunity to try and actually make friends,” she said. “I put a band together. It was my first band, my middle-school band, a garage band. We never could settle on a name. But we would jam after school, and that was always fun. I was singing, playing guitar, writing.”
But a few years later, she landed the role of Jenny Humphrey on Gossip Girl in 2007, which is where she met Badgley, playing his younger sister on the hit teen drama.
“So as soon as I started to find my little groove in school as a normal kid, Gossip Girl came about, and I got uprooted to New York and the band fell apart,” she said. “We were going to be huge. It was a real bummer. And I had to kind of restart it all again in New York, which didn’t take me that long.”
As for her time in Whoville, Momsen previously reminisced on her experience filming the classic holiday movie during an interview with the Today show in 2020, to celebrate the film’s 20th anniversary.
“I think that people love The Grinch just simply because the core of the story is so sweet and it’s so heartwarming and it has such a good message,” she said at the time. “Aside from how amazing Jim Carrey’s performance is and the theatrics that went into the shoot, just the way the film looks and moves and is edited is amazing in its own right.”
