Leighton Meester On Motherhood And Being Away From Her Kids

The actress says she could truly”dig into” her character for her new movie, The Weekend Away

In an interview with Cosmopolitan UK, Leighton Meester talked about how much she related to her character in The Weekend Away — a mom who takes her first trip after having a baby.

“It was like, ‘a 35-year-old with a 10-month old.’ That is exactly me,” Meester said of when she first read the script. The thriller, now available on Netflix, tells the story of Beth, a new mom and American living in London. When Beth goes away for a girls’ weekend with her friend Kate, tragedy ensues, and Beth unravels the mystery through a series of plot twists.

“It’s definitely centered about her journey into motherhood and sort of how that is coloring her experience and how she’s seeing the world,” said Meester. “I thought that was really something I could kind of dig into and enjoy.”

“I was really excited about playing a new mother who’s having a weekend away for the first time, which is both the most exciting prospect and the most terrifying when you have a new baby,” added Meester.

The Gossip Girl alum and her husband, fellow actor Adam Brody, are parents to 6-year-old daughter, Arlo, and a son born in 2020. (They have not shared his name.) Meester presumably spent time away from her children while filming The Weekend Away on location in Croatia.

Speaking of how she might respond to a crisis like the one her character faces, Meester said, “I do think the element of being away from your child is very different from when you’re with your child.”

“There is a need, at least for me,” she continued, “when anything happens that if your kid gets hurt . . . that’s the number one concern and you have to be the grown-up, which it’s really hard to be even when you are the grown-up.”

As a parent, Meester said, she feels like she has to “set the tone and be calm and comforting and freak out later.”

“She’s not with her kid,” Meester said of Beth. “That would drive me mad. I would be devastated to be in a situation like that and be thousands of miles away from my kid.”

We can only imagine Meester slides easily into the role of reassuring, protective adult, no matter which continent she happens to be on!