‘Gossip Girl’s’ Chace Crawford Reveals How Don Johnson ‘Bullied’ Him Into Returning to TV

TCA 2015: A phone call brought the two stars together for ABC’s “Blood & Oil”

A phone call from Don Johnson brought Chace Crawford back to television for his first roll since “Gossip Girl.”

“I bullied him into it,” Johnson Wednesday at a Television Critics Association summer press tour panel for ABC’s forthcoming drama “Blood & Oil,” on which both actors star.

“It was nice to get a call from Don Johnson” Crawford said. He added, “I had the biggest grin on my face. It was great. I was already in the process of heading in that direction. I was really excited about getting involved in TV again, and it was great to get a call from Don.”

Crawford, who in “Blood & Oil” plays a young, married oil worker trying to make his fortune, said he was glad to be playing a character different from the one he portrayed on “Gossip Girl.”

“It’s nice to play an adult, right?” Crawford said. “It’s great. I kind of grew up on ‘Gossip Girl.’ I played sort of a high school kid.” Of “Blood & Oil,” he said, “You know, I’m from Texas, and it’s sort of the best pilot I read.”

Johnson rejected comparisons of the show, about a modern-day oil boom town in North Dakota, to the classic television series “Dallas” or of his character to that show’s lead anti-hero, J.R. Ewing.

“I’m very respectful, God rest his soul, of Larry Hagman,” the actor who played Ewing, Johnson said. But, he added, his “Blood & Oil” character is “an amalgamation of these types of characters, of these types of people, and I rolled them into Hap Briggs.”

“Blood & Oil” premieres Sept. 27 at 9 p.m. on ABC.

 

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