Badley went on to say there was “just something unique” about him having played Dan before taking on the role of Joe.
“I think Breaking Bad came out in 2008. That was, like, a huge moment where we’re suddenly interested in a different kind of an antihero or a villain, you know?” he continued. “I think Dan, you know, was meant to be this sort of moral compass and that became increasingly irrelevant to the show, to Gossip Girl, [from] my understanding of it all. So to take somebody, you know, who’s known for this particular kind of, like, you know, this iconography of nice guy, maybe without a lot of dimension, and then putting them in this—not to mention that, at the end of Gossip Girl, technically speaking, Dan was revealed to be a total sociopath. He was manipulating….So, you know, yeah, it was not lost.”