A FEW MONTHS BEFORE BECOMING the toast of New York, Thomas Doherty, Evan Mock, and Eli Brown, the male leads of HBO Max’s Gossip Girl reboot, are drinking at buzzy downtown French bistro Lucien. Over spicy margaritas, the boys start comparing their characters with those from the original series. Doherty’s Max Wolfe, an arched-eyebrowed instigator of chaos, is the Chuck Bass figure—and Doherty acts circles around Ed Westwick. Doherty presents a theory to Brown: “You’re—what’s his name, Dan?” Brown replies, “That’s what they’ve been saying! By they, I mean my fans.” The fans got that one right: As the Brooklyn-dwelling Otto “Obie” Bergmann IV, Brown brings a Dan Humphrey–like sense of nominal moral clarity to the show’s twisted social matrix. They turn to Mock. His character, the mellow Akeno “Aki” Menzies,…
