Chace Crawford is hot gossip

Strange things happen to young girls' faces when you mention that Chace Crawford is in town. They flush and goggle and look like they might cry from happiness. You can practically hear their little hearts beating faster. To them, he is a bona fide, scream-inducing matinée idol. To the rest of us, he's a guilty pleasure, the cherry on the TV ice-cream sundae that is

When I meet Chace, I go to shake hands but he opts for a quick hug, all clean cashmere and taut muscularity. He's so firm across the chest it's like hugging Ken, Barbie's boyfriend. His face, too, is Disney-perfect, with high-coloured cheeks and eyes that actually twinkle. As we walk to our table through Shoreditch House everyone stops eating to eyeball him. Back to your lunch, guys, he's with me.

'This place is awesome!' he says, looking out of the window innocently, affecting not to notice the attention. 'We're in London, so I might get a pint.' He was taught to say that by his former flatmate and Gossip Girl co-star, the English actor Ed Westwick, who also has him supporting Arsenal. 'We're going to a game on Saturday,' he says. It's nice to see their friendship hasn't been affected by the rumours, spread by Perez Hilton in 2008, that they were a gay couple. Chace has since been linked with starlets including The Kills' Alison Mosshart and Twilight's Ashley Greene, though neither came to anything. 'I've come close but I've not really gone the distance. I haven't had a girlfriend for a while,' he shrugs. 'A girl who strikes a chord comes round once in a blue moon. I'm not the kind of guy to date a girl just for the sake of it. I don't need a girlfriend.'

On Chace's tanned neck I notice something suspiciously like a lovebite. 'That's from paintballing in Dallas last week.' He always gets roughed up by his school friends when he goes home to Texas. 'They remind me I'm just Chace.' Unlike the preposterously preppy Nate Archibald, the blazer-wearing dynast he plays in Gossip Girl, Chace is a down-home Texas-born boy who visited New York for the first time on a school trip aged 16. 'We just did a bunch of touristy stuff.' The next time he came back he was filming the pilot of Gossip Girl, staying at the Gramercy Park Hotel, 'going to the Rose Bar every night, shooting pool. I fell in love with the city.'

Now he is one of New York's icons, with hundreds of fans turning out to watch him filming Gossip Girl on location. Chace confesses that, playing the particularly camp, dramatically febrile scenes, he occasionally collapses into laughter. 'Like when you're walking past someone, and you have to turn and face them in this big dramatic reveal – we would just lose our shit.' Ed Westwick helps him snap out of it. 'Stop it, just stop it now,' says Chace, imitating Ed's English accent.

In the fourth series, Nate finally gets together with the other alpha character, Serena van der Woodsen, played by Blake Lively. 'Yeah, it was always going to happen at some point,' he says (he had already kissed almost every other girl in the show including Blake). 'It would either have to be Serena, or one of the moms or the other guys'

Chace occasionally flashes a sharp sense of humour. His father is a dermatologist – did that ever come in handy? 'He would give me facewash,' he says. 'I had Botox age nine, that's when we started. And then just the occasional facelift.' Chace graduated from Trinity Christian Academy in Texas and Pepperdine University, a select college in California with a strong religious creed (he's Southern Baptist, and still goes to church 'from time to time'). He was not always a good student, he admits. 'I have quite a wild imagination, and I can draw. I'd spend a lot of time in class drawing masterpieces of the stupidest things.'

As a child he was diagnosed with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). He now feels that was unwarranted. 'I don't know, but I don't think I am ADD. Now I'm much more interested in knowledge and learning. I watch a lot of documentaries and news, I have a hunger for that. As a kid, I was more interested in daydreaming and friends.' He was treated with a drug similar to Adderall. 'They used to really overprescribe that stuff.' I must be pulling a horrified face because he tries to lighten the tone, adding wryly: 'Maybe it was good I took a little bit of medication, y'know? To help facilitate my schoolwork.' Shortly after our interview, Chace was arrested for possession of less than two ounces of marijuana. He was back in Texas with a school friend and they were found with an unlit joint. Chace, who denies the charge, is currently out on bail.

The pressure of constant scrutiny seems to weigh heavy on this 25-year-old. Private photos of him with friends, goofing around at parties, have surfaced on the internet. It must be hard for him to go on dates. 'It is, you know. I don't want to sound like I'm bitching, but it's gotten more difficult to connect with people on that innocent, level playing field.' He had a serious girlfriend at high school for three years but since then there's only really been Carrie Underwood, the platinum blonde winner of American Idol in 2005, known for her Country and Western hits such as 'Jesus, Take the Wheel'.

'Being around Texas girls all my life, that's what I'm used to. Maybe it's their charm, the way they're raised, their decorousness. My mom kept the household together, managed everything. We were her life' – Chace has a younger sister Candice, a former Miss Missouri and a TV journalist – 'and that's taught me a lot about what I'm gonna want from a girl eventually. I'm using a French phrase to describe a Texan girl but they have a je ne sais quoi.'

For the moment, though, there's rien doing. 'I've dated around, but nothing serious. The process of meeting people has gotten pretty abstract. It could be a bit of paranoia thrown in there on my side, just being wary of other people's intentions, or people having preconceived notions of who I am. There's a public perception of you that's created, and that makes things hard. But I just try to be myself, and to hang on to that. I'll figure it out.' Maybe he should try going anonymous online? 'It has crossed my mind. And, y'know, it's funny you mention that,' he says, changing gear into a comic riff: 'I do speed dating on Wednesdays, JDate on Tuesdays. I shouldn't be on JDate, I'm not Jewish'