Woody Allen role tops a lively year
BLAKE Lively is recalling her time auditioning for Woody Allen for his new film Café Society. Even with all her experience, the 29-year-old actress was intimidated. “There were a couple of people in the room, no cameras, nothing,” she says, breathlessly. “He j ust watches it, walks around you, and says, ‘Okay, can you say it again but louder’. “A moment of cl arity t hen dawned. I realised I was totally whispering so that he couldn’t actually hear me! Because if he couldn’t hear me, he couldn’t think I was bad.”
It’s a charming anecdote, one that shows that even the famous can feel fragile. The blonde, statuesque Lively has managed six seasons on the hit show Gossip Girl, and has been directed by Oliver Stone (in Savages) and Ben Affleck ( The Town), but she speaks about her casting by Allen with all the surprise of a lottery winner.
A fan of his films, “I never imagined that I would be in one,” she says. “I would’ve liked to have been, but I didn’t set that as a goal for myself.”
Arriving for our interview in a stunning yellow velvet Valentino gown – never mind that it’s early afternoon – it feels like Lively is still living in the film’s glamorous 1930s setting, or has just stepped out of one of her Chanel campaigns.
Chiefly set around fancy Hollywood parties and chic nightclubs, Café Society is classic Allen wish-fulfilment, as Jesse Eisenberg’s New Yorker arrives in LA to swoon over both Kristen Stewart’s spiky secretary and Lively’s coolly chic socialite, Veronica.
While she makes her presence felt in her few scenes, it’s not a huge role for Lively. “I didn’t care if it was one line, one scene, or playing a janitor,” she retorts.
“He’s one of the few film-makers who really, really writes to women. They’re fully realised women; they’re not one thing or the other.
“You’re not hired to be the intellect or the bimbo… so you’re not thinking, ‘I’m going to be the tart of the film’ or ‘I’m going to be the intellectual bitch.’ You know that the woman will be multifaceted and not thin - sliced.”
Even without the pleasures that working with Allen has brought, it’s been a stellar year for Lively.
Currently pre gnant with her second child – she and actor-husband Ryan Reynolds already have one young daughter, James – Lively has seen her shark-attack movie The Shallows become one of the sleeper hits of the summer, grossing $84 million (R1.2 billion) across the globe.
This month, she’ll present All I See Is You at the Toronto Inter national Film Festival, playing a blind woman who gradually regains her sight. “It’s probably the work that I’m the most proud of,” she says.
All very different experiences, and Lively admits it’s been instructive to switch between lead and support, as she is in Café Society.
“Sometimes the hardest thing is, when you’re playing the main role, you have to be likeable the whole time,” she says. “So you can’t be as potent. Sometimes coming in for smaller roles, you get to go further with whatever direction you’re going.
“You get to come in a lot stronger… that’s why they call them character actors. It’s not your job to charm every single person in the whole movie.”
Then there’s Deadpool – her husband’s Marvel Comics mega-hit from earlier in the year.
Café Society opens tomorrow. – The Independent