Mrs Deadpool Blake Lively
She may have made her biggest headlines as a Gossip Girl, Mrs Deadpool and a wannabe Martha Stewart, but prepare to double-take on Blake Lively with two knockout performances in Woody Allen’s Café Society and great white thriller, The Shallows
Blake Lively is explaining the reason for her bare feet. It has something to do with arriving into Cannes for the film festival only last night, and missing luggage, and airline pyjamas, and needing to borrow a sweater off a friend. Total
Film nods understandably though the precise details are far from clear and it remains something of a mystery how the blonde curls that cascade to her waist are so perfect and the golden gown that she models is so very dazzling and yet her feet are unclad. “The barefoot interview,” she laughs, settling down in a hotel suite with a glorious view of the Croisette. “I should have worn my airline pyjamas – that would have been a whole new look.”
Lively, of course, knows a thing or two about fashion. Part of the reason she is in Cannes is to fulfil her duties as a L’Oréal spokesperson, a gig that requires her attendance at three premieres, two photocalls, a luncheon and a dinner. She takes the L’Oréal slogan – “Because I’m worth it” – very seriously, and stresses the brand’s partnering with such iconic, sociopolitically engaged women as Jane Fonda and Susan Sarandon in its effort to promote self-worth among women. But she also has the not inconsiderable honour of being one of the primary players in the festival’s opening film:
Café Society, a romantic dramedy set in ’30s Hollywood and directed by some whippersnapper named Woody Allen.
“A Woody Allen movie is such specific writing, such a refined cadence, so I never saw myself as fitting into that world, though I love it,” she begins when asked how it came to be. “But I was asked to come in and audition. I was given about six pages, and they didn’t tell me anything about the time period or about the character. Nothing. They just said, ‘Here you go. It’s a lovely woman.’ I said, ‘Okaaay…’ They said, ‘Take your time.’ And about five minutes later, they said, ‘Are you good?’ How is that taking your time?” She grins, an explosion of enamel. “And so I did it once in a room with a couple of people and Woody – no cameras, very low-key. Then he says, ‘OK, do it again. Just this time, louder’. I realised I must have been whispering, I was so nervous. But then the next day, I got a phone call asking if I wanted to do it.”