Blake Lively, 27, told Allure‘s May 2015 issue that playing Serena van der Woodsen on the CW hit dramedy Gossip Girl felt “personally compromising,” and stopped being fun after awhile. Though the series’ epic finale aired three years ago, Blake is now expressing her true feelings about playing Serena.
The real-life Blake is a squeaky clean holistic honey who recently launched her own lifestyle website, Preserve. It’s a far cry from her six seasons as her former Gossip Girl persona, a poor little rich girl who spent her days coordinating her outfits and getting caught up in insane hijinks.
“It’s a weird thing when people feel like they know you really well, and they don’t,” Lively said to Allure. “I would not be proud to be the person who gave someone the cocaine that made them overdose and then shot someone and slept with someone else’s boyfriend.”
Serena, why did your dad only show up in a helicopter when it was convenient?
“People loved it, but it always felt a little personally compromising — you want to be putting a better message out there,” she said. “The lines become blurred… It doesn’t help when everybody is dating who they’re dating on the show, and you’re also saying to the costume designer, ‘Hey, can I take that home?'”
Blake, of course, dated co-star Penn Badgley, 28, who played her onscreen boyfriend Dan Humphrey, from 2008 to 2010. Dan seemed like the only moral voice of reason on the show — he had real problems! he liked to write! he lived in BROOKLYN! — but worlds were shattered when it was revealed in the finale (spoilers) that he was the baddest B of them all: he was Gossip Girl.
Quick; someone call Penn and ask him how he feels about his character now!
When Gossip Girl ended in 2012, Blake took a long hiatus from acting and started lifestyle site Preserve. “I wanted to reset,” she said. “It taps into so many of my own passions, but it also is a business that I can control. If I can be successful at this, I have security for my family and my babies.”
Babies — was that plural that we read, Blake?
In a world post-Gossip Girl, Blake is hardly sitting around, waiting for her next move. The actress and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, 38, just welcomed baby girl James on January 5, and opened up again to Allure about the the challenges of new motherhood.
Blake told the magazine that breastfeeding is like a full-time job in itself, that she’s “like, driving down the road, pumping.”
But how does the actress and first-time mother, who recently starred in Age of Adaline, have it all? The answer? She really doesn’t.
“Most of the things I do are all-consuming, but somehow I find a way to do it all. It’s not having it all; it’s about doing it all,” Lively says, “but it’s dangerous to dilute that to a catchphrase.”
HollywoodLifers, do YOU think Blake should have dissed her Gossip Girl character?
— Samantha Wilson
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