Profile: Blake Lively
Hollywood’s sly, self-effacing sex symbol
Blake Lively never caught the acting bug—the acting bug caught her. She was born into a movie industry family: her dad, Ernie Lively, is an actor and her mom is a talent scout. Her older brother pressured her to audition for the role of Bridget in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants back in 2005. And it turned out to be a perfect role for Lively, whose fun-loving nature belies an inherent ability to hold her own in darker territory (in the movie, Bridget is revealed to suffer from mental illness).
While most success stories you read about are littered with words and phrases like “perseverance” and “hard work,” Lively’s isn’t. Her truly insouciant charm is refreshing. But to sum her up as some breezy blonde with a bright smile and pin-up-girl body would be misleading. Because despite having the poise of someone who doesn’t sweat it, she has the chops and the emotional depth of someone who does. What’s beautiful about Lively stems from how deceptively and naturally talented she is.
After Sisterhood, she got parts (and good notices) in Accepted (2006), with Justin Long, and Elvis and Annabelle (2007), in which she played a bulimic beauty pageant hopeful and shed some serious weight. Career pay dirt finally arrived when she took the part of Serena in the CW series Gossip Girl (2007–12), flawlessly straddling the madonna-whore fence and winning a huge teen following. During that five-year run she made Time‘s 100 Most Influential People list. She became the face of the fragrance Gucci Premiere. And perhaps most important, she played the love interest of Ryan Reynolds in Green Lantern (2011). It was a big-budget DC comic-book movie that performed only so-so, but she and Reynolds became an item and then married. Now they have a daughter, James, and another baby on the way. In a recent Today show interview, the 28-year-old Lively said she’s hoping for a big family, with typical self-effacing wit: “I’m one of five kids, my husband is one of four, so we are officially breeders. You can go on our website and we’ll give you some of our children.”
That hasn’t stopped Lively from taking on some onscreen challenges. When Jennifer Lawrence turned down Oliver Stone’s Savages in order to do The Hunger Games, Lively jumped in, filming some sizzling hot sex scenes as part of a ménage à trois with Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. And this year she’s giving a great white shark a run for its money in The Shallows, a beach horror movie that features her bruised up in a bikini. We’re not sure who is more likely to be breaking into a hot sweat this time: Lively or her audiences.
