A Little Less Lively

From teen it-girl to rural blogger, Blake Lively is stepping back from the spotlight, and with good reason.

“I don’t want a quIeter lIfe, necessarily, but I certainly want one wIth less chaos and more stability”

Blake Lively spent much of her time growing up in California, hanging out at the beach where surfing was one of her passions. Although she had the occasional mishap – “I once cracked my nose” – the tall, blonde actress loved the feeling of energy that riding on the waves provided, yet one of the movie world’s healthiest, foodiest, liveliest actresses is perhaps starting to mellow.

That would certainly explain her decision to play the character Emily in new film A Simple Favor. This diversion is one altogether closer to a core thriller territory, where mysticism and murder replace the bubbly, ballsy resonances of so much of what she has taken to in the past.

In the script, Emily, the friend of a small-town blogger (Anna Kendrick), goes missing, with the movie opening up into a story of betrayals and reversals, a dead body and the revolving question of who is duping whom.

“I know this is a darker side,” she begins. “I think it’s just something in someone that you haven’t seen before, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not always been there. The characters are just a bit over the top, they’re best and worst friends, I guess. They’re two women who come together and the storyline embeds them in so many twists and turns that, at points, we have to rewind and start again.”

“That was the exciting thing about shooting this film, too - we were all going through it. Every day we’d have to diagram the plot out before we started working - only once we got into character would the fun come to the fore... which is the opposite of what you would think because we were so stressing it before the scenes.”

“It comes down to the fact, as an actress, I love not knowing what’s going to happen next. I love going into a movie and being completely surprised, and it’s so rare that that happens.”

The 30-year-old Lively is married to Canadian heartthrob Ryan Reynolds, who recently scored the biggest hit of his career with the billion-dollar blockbuster Deadpool. They live in the quiet town of Bedford in upstate New York together with their daughters, James (yes, really), and Ines, in what appears a picture-perfect life where the sum total of their potential as big-screen performers essentially comes down to how well they can balance family life with work.

“There has always been something special about Ryan, and I knew that from very soon after we met,” she says. “I guess I knew he would always be my best friend for life - that was the biggest thing to me. I’d never known anything like the friendship that I had with him. I could like him as much as I loved him.”

That blossoming love has seen the duo become established as one of the industry’s modern power couples, though in both there is a reassuring humility, no doubt brought on by a lifestyle that focuses on family values.

“When you have a family and settle down the things that seemed important before just aren’t,” she says. “I don’t want a quieter life, necessarily, but I certainly want one with less chaos and more stability, and that has to be what every parent craves.”

And of course, any remaining instability can be played out in the ‘pretend’ world of film, something Lively is expressing in her new project. It’s certainly all a long way from the quickfire chaos of teen drama Gossip Girl.

“That’s true,” she nods. “With Gossip Girl there were times where we would be shooting two to three episodes at once, 27 episodes a year, 16- to 18-hour days every single day - it was just nuts, but great fun.”

“It was nice living and working in New York City, and we didn’t even have the pressure of having to act well, because there wasn’t the time to! They would give us our lines at the very last second because they were still writing them - it was so hard to keep up with that machine, but a great experience nevertheless.”

The challenges nowadays are very different, and so befits someone who takes quality over quantity where her acting endeavours are concerned.

“Anything I’m taking on now must be really challenging – I’m done with the simple stuff. It must inspire me because my time at home with Ryan and the children is so special and beautiful.”

“There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to disrupt that life at all, even though I still love my work so much. But I do want to keep working, and I want to be good enough to combine that with being a mum and having a happy family, because raising children has always been my biggest dream.”

“Children are always full of surprises, whether it’s getting crapped on or getting this big smile that you can’t stop looking at. You want that moment to last forever.”

The actress pauses momentarily, before adding: “Okay, wind back, maybe you don’t want the crapping thing to last forever, but the rest, okay?”

Maybe the Gossip Girl Blake Lively hasn’t quite gone away completely!