Christopher Chace Crawford was born July 18, 1985, in Lubbock, Texas, to father Chris, a dermatologist, and mother Dana, a teacher. His upbringing wasn’t very Upper East Side, growing up in the heart of Texas, but once he reached high school, he attended the private Trinity Christian Academy and found it could get gossipy.
While Chace was mostly a good boy, he did get into a spot of trouble. Opting for painting and drawing over studying drama, Chace also played football and golf and had a part-time job. After graduation, Chace moved to California to attend Pepperdine University, where he joined the Sigma Nu frat and studied broadcast journalism for a time.
His mother encouraged him to pursue acting, and with some modeling experience under his belt, Chace was immediately signed by an agent. His first acting gig was in Long Lost Son, playing an abducted son who reunites with his mother. While filming The Covenant, a supernatural thriller about five rich prep school guys with superpowers, Chace met co-stars Sebastian Stan and Taylor Kitsch, with whom he remains friends.
With that relatively limited experience, Chace auditioned for the role of Nate Archibald in the Gossip Girl pilot. Though he was new to acting, there was a “sense of decency in Nate from Chace,” said Josh, which made an audience want to follow him on his journey. “It’s all new to me,” said Chace when the cast began filming Gossip Girl. Though Penn decided to live on his own, Chace and Ed Westwick got an apartment together in Chelsea.
On the show’s racy content, Chace has mixed feelings. Chace appeared in two more films in 2008, Loaded, an action film starring Jesse Metcalfe, and The Haunting of Molly Hartley, a horror film with him in another private school uniform. After meeting Leona Lewis in London, she asked him to appear in her video, “I Will Be.” For his work on Gossip Girl, Chace won the Teen Choice Award for Choice Breakout TV Star Male in the same year that his younger sister Candice won the Miss Missouri USA title. (Candice competed for the Missouri rather than Texas title because she was attending the University of Missouri and living in Columbia.)
Chace was spotted with country singer Carrie Underwood and for a brief period, the gossip magazines made a big deal out of the new couple and their breakup, which reportedly was by text message. “It was mutual,” said Chace of the break-up.
In addition to prying into his romance with Carrie, rumor had it that Chace and former *NSync member JC Chasez were lovers, and/or he and roommate Ed Westwick were. In a Details interview, Chace mocked the press’s characterization of him: “Model turned actor, dime a dozen, eye candy, doesn’t know what he’s doing . . . and Perez Hilton says I have ‘gayface.’ So on top of everything else, I have to overcome gayface.”
Taking a similar approach to the rumors printed about him as his co-stars, Chace said in V Man, “There’s a lot of speculation with no reality to it, complete fabrications about my private life. It’s just comical. I let it roll off my back.” In the break between seasons 2 and 3 of filming Gossip Girl, Chace was cast in Twelve, a Joel Schumacher–directed adaptation of the Nick McDonell novel about drug use and decadence on the Upper East Side, costarring Rory Culkin, Emma Roberts, and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson.
After Zac Efron dropped out of the Footloose remake, Chace was cast as his replacement. “Fame can be a double-edged sword,” said Chace. “But right now I couldn’t ask for more, and I certainly never complain about it. Actually, I genuinely like meeting people out and about, and making relationships. I find I have a natural affinity for people.”