Leighton Meester stops short of quashing rumours her days on Gossip Girl are numbered.
The 24-year-old star of the hit CW soap about Manhattan elites is currently starring in the Nashville melodrama Country Strong as an up-and-coming singer-songwriter on a tumultuous tour with an embattled superstar. (And yes, that is Meester flexing her vocal chops in the film.) Then in February she stars in the thriller The Roommate.
Clearly all this extra-curricular activity begs the question: is she planning her exit from the series?
"Obviously we're under contract for a certain amount of time," she says. "I think in the fourth year (the producers) start going, 'OK, we know the timing of things. We know how much we need you and how much we don't.' They've been very kind to let us out (to do films). I'm been lucky enough to find projects that I really like to do.
"Usually they're on hiatus. (Country Strong) was not. I had to threaten everybody in my life, including my manager and my agent -- 'If I can't do this, I'm moving to Costa Rica, I'm never going to work again, I'm turning off my phone.' I was bluffing, but it worked."
Meester's hardly the only Gossip Girl cast member who's been moonlighting in movies. Blake Lively had a showy role in Ben Affleck's crime thriller The Town and she's starring opposite Ryan Reynolds in this summer's superhero epic Green Lantern. (Leading predictably to reports that Lively wants to bolt the show.) Penn Badgley has appeared in The Stepfather and Easy A. Chace Crawford made the indie Twelve (and for a time was set to replace Zac Efron in the remake of Footloose).
PALTROW UN-AVENGED: Meester's Country Strong co-star Gwyneth Paltrow won't be assembling with Robert Downey Jr. for Marvel's all-star The Avengers.
"No, I'm not going to be in it," says the Oscar-winner, who played Tony Stark's girl Friday Pepper Potts in Iron Man and its sequel. The Avengers, which starts filming in the spring for a May 2012 opening, teams up Downey's Iron Man with Chris Evans' Captain America and Chris Hemsworth's Thor. Also in the cast are Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow, Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury, Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye and Mark Ruffalo's Hulk.
Paltrow sounds more optimistic that she will reprise the character for Iron Man 3, which is expected to start shooting after The Avengers.
"I think it comes out in 2013," she says. "But I haven't heard anything about it yet."
Marvel and new corporate owner Disney are currently searching for a new director, now that Jon Favreau has opted out of returning.
TOWERING AMBITION: As elaborate and involved as Marvel's plot is, it may be dwarfed by the multi-media adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Tower.
Right now plans call for Ron Howard to direct a film to be released in 2013. It will be followed by a television series -- with the same cast -- and then big-screen sequels.
The latest reports suggest Howard is zeroing in on a leading man. According to the New York Post, Javier Bardem and Viggo Mortensen are both in the running to play gunslinger Roland Deschain in the epic, which fuses fantasy, myth and western iconography. Presumably whoever lands the part will be occupied for the next several years. Assuming, of course, the first film doesn't flop.
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