This picture is perfect. Blake Lively is not! The Gossip Girl star has grown up into something much more interesting since

The Gossip Girl star has grown up into something much more interesting: a real, messy, opinionated woman.

sitting in her frayed blue jeans and eating ceviche, Blake Lively looks exactly like the laid-back LA golden girl we first came to love in The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants and Gossip Girl. But the past decade has been transformative for the actress, who turned 30 last August. She married her Green Lantern costar Ryan Reynolds, and had two daughters – Ines, just over a year old, and James, two.

Professionally, she moved into more complex roles: the drug-addled single mom in Ben Affleck’s The Town, a 1930s divorcée in Woody Allen’s Café Society and a blind woman who sees her marriage differently once she regains sight in All I See Is You. Her next big career move: producing The Husband’s Secret, a movie based on a book by Liane Moriarty, the author of Big Little Lies (Penguin; R166). Blake will star, but as executive producer she’ll have more creative control, a bigger financial stake and the ability to plan her schedule around her family.it’s a savvy move, and one that could earn her new cred in an industry where women are learning the power of telling their own stories.

She sounds a decade wiser, too. She talks about sexist stage direction in scripts and how the election ‘awakened’ her; she’s deeply educated on issues of child exploitation like sex trafficking and child pornography. She might still have Serena van der Woodsen’s glorious hair, but she’s developed the kind of thoughtful feminist attitude that comes only with experience. We discussed it all.

How does it work to have two people with amazing careers? It must require careful negotiation.

I admire people who find that what fulfils them is their art or work, but what fulfils both me and my husband is our family. Knowing that, everything else comes second. We’ve given up stuff we loved in order to not work at the same time. I’m fortunate to be in a place where I get to find material – a book or script – early and develop it. So I know ahead of time that I’ll be working on this job at this time. And we can plan around it.

One thing you found early is The Husband’s Secret. What made you say “I want to produce this one”?

It’s a little bit pulpy; that makes it really fun. And there are a bunch of women at the centre of it – strong women, flawed women. Any day you employ women, to me, is a good day.

You’ve said you’re drawn to complicated characters, but not just complicated because they’re damaged.

I think on-screen – at least in the mainstream – complicated women are black-and-white. They’re villains or heroic. And that’s just not real life. We all have lightness, and we all have darkness, and we all have plenty of shades in between.

Do you agree with Reese Witherspoon that, to achieve industry parity, women must produce their own stuff?

I think it helps a lot. Nobody’s going to fight for you as much as you fight for yourself. That said, I know a lot of great men – directors, producers, studio heads – looking to tell stories about women, some because they’re drawn to those stories, some because they’re husbands or fathers and want to see the women in their life represented more accurately, and some just because they look at the numbers. They say, “Wonder Woman has replaced religion. We should probably invest in female superhero movies.”

How did the US election change your mindset?

It made me more aware, more conscious, more sensitive. Not just of sexism but of discrimination in all areas – class, gender, race. I had realised that there were problems [before]. You know, I do a lot of work against sex trafficking. There are hundreds of thousands of missing-children reports every year; some of those children are sex-trafficked. But that’s not reported. You see stories about only the wealthy, middleclass white girls who have been kidnapped. There are people missing all the time, but because they’re minorities, because they come from impoverished neighbourhoods, they don’t make the news. That is so devastating.

“If something is beautiful, knowing that this too shall pass makes you hold on to the moment. Savour it.”