Interview: Blake Lively

Tuesday, 14 June 2011 21:05

Blake Lively was a total gossip girl during this conversation about her gig in this month’s Green Lantern.

Even though this Chanel brand ambassador came into the project not having a clue about the DC superhero comic or the character of Carol Ferris, the leading lady lit up when mulling about going “green” and getting into the world of comics. The 23-year-old Gossip Girl star also talked about "playing with herself,” the unlikely role that caught the attention of Warner Bros casting execs, and the appeal of guys without supernatural powers. And for the record, no legs greased up or boobs out, please.

By Prairie Miller

How does it feel to have your very own Green Lantern Barbie? Oh my gosh—crazy. It’s so wild. I feel like I need to go home and buy Barbie's Magical Dream house and play with myself. Wait, that doesn’t sound right. Next question!

How did you find your inner villain? The way that this movie came to me was that I had made The Town with Warner Bros, and they saw the footage of The Town and they said they wanted me to look at Green Lantern. I still had to audition for it.

It was really nice that this was a studio that wasn’t looking for some girl to have her legs greased up and her boobs out, and that’s all that mattered. They saw a pain-riddled, drug-addicted, drug-mule mother from Boston [in The Town] and said, "Oh, we want her to be the female face of our next film."

And those are the people I want to work for; that’s the kind of story that I want to tell—where the art and the craft means something to them. And I think they saw from my role in The Town that I was able to be dark and angry and be a villain.

What was it like having Ryan Reynolds as your leading guy? Without Ryan, there would have been no Hal Jordan. He’s somebody who could be incredibly intimidating, and he’s incredibly talented and intelligent. But he’s also very humble, kind, witty and charming.

And to relay all of those emotions, he’s a very human superman. And I loved that about Ryan. I loved that about Green Lantern. All I did was screen test with Ryan once, and it was more about seeing the chemistry between Hal and Carol and to see if we could spar against each other and have that rivalry and that tension, but also that kindness and care.

How does Ryan's character, Hal, measure up to your kind of man? I really love that Hal wasn’t a superman; he is just a man, and he had reservations about being the person responsible for saving planet Earth. And he had weaknesses. His father was taken from him, he was a person with great potential but was broken and guarded. I loved that, because not everyone is a hero.

You know, he's somebody who inherits great responsibility, but you’re not really sure he wants it.

I’m not sure every man in the world would say, "Yeah, you know what, I want to sacrifice my life to go fight aliens and have my family specifically attacked and targeted, and lose everyone I love and save the Earth."

What stood out about your character, Carol? She’s a very strong woman. She’s a businesswoman. She inherits her father’s aviation company. She’s also militant; she’s a fighter pilot. But she’s also very caring and kind, and she has this relationship with Hal. They’re each other’s first love. They’ve known each other since they were children.

She witnessed his father’s death with him, so there’s that history. Also, keep in mind that she becomes a villain. You have to have those kinds of teeth apparent in the beginning, so it makes sense that her arc goes there. So there are a lot of different levels to play with her. I really appreciated not being the damsel in distress!

How would you compare Carol to Superman's Lois Lane or Spiderman's Mary Jane? She’s very non-traditional in that she goes head-to-head with Hal. They are always challenging each other was something really nice. You know, she’s not waiting for him to save her. There are times where he experiences weakness and where she has to come in and save him. And I think that that’s a little more like real life.

Were you aware of the Green Lantern comic before? No, I actually knew nothing about Green Lantern. And I imagined that nobody else in the world knew anything about Green Lantern! But as soon as I got the role, I was quickly humbled about how naive I was.

To introduce, or reintroduce, a character to a younger generation, you have a lot more freedom, and you’re not being compared to all the different incarnations you’ve seen before. So that’s really exciting.

How does this compare to the attention you got for Gossip Girl? You definitely feel the pressure. Before I even took on the role I felt the pressure to make the fans proud, to do the character justice. When a story has been developing for so long―this is one of the longest-running comic books of all time―there’s such history there.

There’s a responsibility to do justice to these characters who people love so much. When we were on set, we had such an attention to detail. Like, there was a question of whether my hair would be blonde or brown. And to me, it was never a question. Carol Ferris is a brunette, and she had to be a brunette. And then once they made that decision, they tested fourteen different shades of brown. I flew out to North Carolina just to test the brown with three different weekends on camera.

Warner Bros is a company that really makes their films with such integrity. They take these big films, and they could just make a lot of money off of them and do a fine job. But if you look at Harry Potter or Batman, the movies that they made are actually really great films, not just big movies that make money.

Did you do a lot of green-screen acting? Well, most of the stuff that we shot was a blue screen. It couldn’t be green, or Ryan would just disappear! That’s very different, because I’m used to being in scenes and having a good idea what it’s going look like when the finished product comes out. But then to exist in a world that doesn’t even have life until we wrap, you know? You’re shooting for six months, and then the movie starts, it's something very different. That makes it that much more exciting when you see it. I now feel like a fan of the movie, whether I was in it or not! I've dedicated six months of my life to it, and I had no idea what it was going to look like.

How is it working with a director like Casino Royale's Martin Campbell? He’s an incredible person to work with. I never met a person who works so hard and is so old! He would get up at 5am and go to the production office. And he would go, "Yeah, it opens at 9am." I said, "Why would you go in at 5am?" And he said, "I get to work before all these people come in and distract me."

And I thought he left at 9am. No, he would continue to be there the whole production day, and leave at 8pm. He is somebody who will take something very fantastical and find the realism in it. So we were really lucky to have Martin tell this sort of story. I love working with him. He spent a lot of time rehearsing, flying out every weekend, and spending twelve hours a day going over the script, and talking about the characters, their back stories and their history.

And then before we would shoot the scene, we would spend an hour in the trailer before shooting. On a film this large, every moment costs a lot of money. And the fact that we could sit in that trailer and rehearse for an hour to make the scenes better, to make the story better, was an amazing, amazing thing.

Are you going to try to be super-villain Star Sapphire in the sequel, if there is one? If this movie is successful and we did a few more films, I’m pretty confident that Star Sapphire would show up. All the conversations are very guarded and protected, even with us, because nobody wants to commit to anything. But I imagine Star Sapphire showing up if we made more films.

What do you think this will do for your career? I don’t think there’s anything negative that you can say about being part of a film that has such a strong fan base and people who are so supportive. To do something that brings people happiness and excitement, you only feed off of that energy. Hopefully people will like it. But I don’t think about jobs and how they’re going to affect my career or my path, you know?

If I connect with a role, with a character, with a story and with the filmmakers, that to me is the reward. That to me is the success. And if they receive it well, then terrific. And if they don’t then at least I had a good time making it.

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