In the criminally underrated romantic comedy Long Shot, Seth Rogen says, on the topic of Jennifer Aniston, “Just ’cause you star in movies doesn’t mean you’re a movie star.” Respect to Aniston, he has a point. Despite having plenty of studio credits to her name, she’s neither an awards contender nor a box-office guarantee, and her best-known role is still the dream girl she played on a hit television show.
But pretend for a moment that Jen stayed married to Brad Pitt, that she got his clout by proxy, accompanying her hunk to premieres and gracing the covers of Vogue and Elle instead of Us and inTouch. Firmly ensconced on the A-list — but with the same track record on film — would we call her a movie star?
Is that what Blake Lively is?
Gossip Girl’s Serena “I have to go” van der Woodsen remains a shadow Lively has never quite shaken, and perhaps she doesn’t want to. Glamorously matching the carpet at the Met Gala, launching a line of hair products — these are very Serena-ish things to do.
Unlike Serena, though, Lively is interested in having a job. Specifically, the job of movie actress, which is not always so easy to get, no matter how popular your teen show was. (Ask the casts of Glee and Beverly Hills 90210. Michelle Williams is the only Dawson’s alum who really does movies anymore.) Then again, Lively had movie cred coming into Gossip Girl, riding high off the success of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Maybe she could make it! As the show came to a close, Lively cashed in her cachet on a “serious project,” The Town, which got her roasted by critics and left enough of a stink that that she’d be critically dismissed for the next decade, only to, months later, star in a box-office flop that probably squandered whatever hopes she still had for a smooth small-to-big-screen transition.
After Gossip Girl went off the air, there was actually a three-year gap in her filmography, during which time she did work on two pretty major non-acting projects: starting a family with her husband and launching her short-lived lifestyle website, Preserve. Perhaps hoping that the memory of her earlier misfires had dissipated, Lively relaunched her movie career in 2015, albeit in a much smaller way. Until the pandemic, she made roughly one film a year, gravitating toward premise-heavy stories with budgets around $25 million. Nothing too complicated, nothing that could generate headlines about a bad box office or even a bad performance.
With her husband’s star on the rise, though, Lively smartly took her time finding the right material to lay the groundwork for a bigger career. She took another break then signed on for a sequel to the well-regarded A Simple Favor, and hopped onto the day’s biggest author’s biggest book. When It Ends With Us came out, she got the positive reviews and the box-office windfall she’d been seeking for nearly two decades. If only the headlines stopped there!
To parse the nuances of a stop-and-start career, and in honor of the upcoming A Simpler Favor — my bad, it’s Another Simple Favor — I’ve undertaken the task of ranking her performances in features (excluding voice work) not by the quality of those films but how well they utilize her specific ability to be vivacious, alluring, and just a little dangerous. In other words, Lively.
The Rhythm Section (2020)
You can blame Blake for the spasmodic British accent, but it’s not her fault the plot has the structural integrity of wet cardboard. Mere months after top Oxford student Stephanie Patrick’s family is killed in a plane crash, she’s become a drug-addicted sex worker selling herself for a hundred bucks a pop, until an investigative journalist tells her the crash was no accident but the work of generically Arab terrorists murdering for the glory of the Prophet (yeah). After going on a number of jogs with an ex-spy played by Jude Law, Patrick kicks her heroin habit and becomes an assassin, but not the sexy, fun kind with a double-entendre code name and a knife hidden in her bra, which she would actually be so good at. The gritty kind who has choppy black hair and a permanent scowl. By the time she’s having sex with Sterling K. Brown (I get it, but the chemistry with Jude was better) and then stabbing him with a syringe of poison, the acting is hardly the point.
(An important lesson for anyone thinking of casting Lively: She should only play rich people. Whatever missteps were made with the costume budget and styling on It Ends With Us, she was correct to insist that her character wear designer duds, however farfetched the explanation. Some actresses have iPhone Face; Lively has Wealth Face.)
The Town (2010)
“You gotta chase the rabbit if you want the tail.”
Watch Serena’s guilt-induced bender at the end of Gossip Girl season one and you’ll see why Ben Affleck thought she’d be good as Krista, the pill-popping sister of Jeremy Renner’s “Gem” in his Boston-set crime thriller. She certainly looks the part, slinking through the bar in a smoky eye, hoop earrings, and little else to Jason Derulo’s “Whatcha Say,” dirty-hot like unwashed silk sheets.
But then she opens her mouth. The accent is a prawblem. It’s nawt good. It’s wicked hahd. For the life of me I can’t tell if her daughter’s name is “Shaye,” “Shoyn,” or “Shy.”
There’s no chemistry with Affleck, least of all when they have talky sex with all their clothes on. She’s supposed to be gum-smacking junkie Barbie, but conveying emotion through an opioid-induced stupor is a task I’ve seen fine, fine actors fail at. Maybe she couldn’t shake Serena and forgot how to embody an adult. It’s the nervous, showy performance of a high-school student who finally convinced the drama teacher to let the class do “heavy material.” Maybe if Affleck weren’t also her co-star he could have directed her a little better. (You know who’s really good in this movie? Jeremy Renner.)
Simon Says (2006)
Per IMDb, this low-budget slasher is about “five high-school seniors (three cute girls) in a VW van on their way to camp by a river in the forest” who “hear about a boy who once killed his identical twin and parents in the area. They ignore the warning.” With that in mind, I declined to track down the DVD, and since it’s unavailable for streaming in the U.S., I guess we’ll all just have to use our imaginations.
I would have omitted it altogether, but as it also stars other members of the Lively family (dad Ernie, sisters Lori and Robyn, brother-in-law Bart Johnson), it has to go somewhere on a list ranked by Liveliness, so I put it here.
All I See Is You (2017)
Blind after the accident that killed her parents, Gina is living somewhat happily in Bangkok with her businessman husband (Jason Clarke) until a surgery restores her sight and she realizes she looks like Blake Lively. The scene where she ties up, blindfolds, and straddles her man on an overnight train through Europe is darkly compelling, and we see the occasional glimpse of the Lively charm, but the rest of the overly stylized and under cooked movie is a watch-through-your-fingers mess. However hard Lively commits to Gina’s journey from despair to paranoia as her vision atrophies, none of the characters have enough humanity to judge how well they’re played.
Savages (2012)
Chon (Taylor Kitsch) and Ben (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) are best, best friends who grow the best, best weed in the whole wide world, and the only thing they love more than each other is their shared girlfriend, Ophelia (Lively), who goes by O. As written and/or directed by Martin McDonagh, this could be the premise of a screwball black comedy for the ages. Hell, their contact at the DEA is John Travolta. Sadly, it’s a violent crime drama from Oliver Stone that tasks Lively with narration like, “Chon’s always trying to fuck the war out of himself. I have orgasms. He has wargasms.”
In the first act, Lively performs as if there’s someone off-camera pointing a gun at her head. In the second, O is kidnapped and actually does have a gun to her head. There’s an undercurrent of electricity between her and the ruthless cartel leader (Salma Hayek) using her as a bargaining chip, but Stone is too cowardly to let the hotties smooch, squandering the only energy Lively was able to muster for this potent strain of mess.
New York, I Love You (2008)
Poor Blake. Of the 11 directors helming shorts in this anthology, she got stuck with Brett Ratner, who cast her as A Hot Girl and gave her two lines. To his credit (I guess), she does fit the part of someone who would take an NYU film major to the prom.
Hick (2011)
This deeply icky picaresque about a 13-year-old runaway (Chloë Grace Moretz) called in Lively for the Blake specialty: a self-loathing drug addict with a heart of gold with whom men are obsessed. She emerges mostly unscathed from the wannabe-profound sludge and gets the best lines: “Church is for brunettes” and “Dear God, don’t let the old man die just yet. Best wishes, Glenda.” (Her name is Glenda.)
Note: This is the second film in which someone kisses Lively’s dead body on the lips.
Accepted (2006)
In a world where no one has heard of community college, what if Ferris Bueller meant to do an Old School but ended up making a Camp Nowhere? Lively plays Monica, the Love Interest and not much more. I watched this movie all the time as a kid and I still think it kind of holds up?
Café Society (2016)
Written, directed, and narrated by no one in particular, Café Society tells the story of Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg) as he transitions from Hollywood assistant to New York club owner, all while being in love with Veronica (Kristen Stewart), who would rather marry his uncle (Steve Carell).
To cope, Bobby impregnates and marries another Veronica (Blake Lively), who is so attractive and kind and cheerful and perfect that we are forced to conclude that Bobby must really, really love brunette Veronica to still be thinking about her despite being wed to an angel. It’s also a film wherein Stewart off-handedly mentions that, sure, Errol Flynn is a rapist who likes his girls young, but when you meet him, he’s a lot of fun. Anyhoo …
One thing I’ll say for the film, set in the 1930s, is that it looks lovely, and Lively looks lovely in it. She’s having the best hair day of her life and doing what she can with the material. If you ever wondered how she would have fared if she’d nabbed the role of Daisy in The Great Gatsby, the answer is … probably fine.
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (2008)
The original YA adaptation traded on Lively’s innate charm and spunk for an organic performance with a simple but potent arc. By the sequel, she’d picked up several acting tics, which, combined with a more contrived plotline (hidden letters, projecting mommy issues onto a skeleton during an archeological dig) make this whole enterprise kind of a nonstarter. Not to mention the somewhat questionable lessons she learns about her mother’s mental illness. Fortunately, the last act finds the Sisterhood in Greece on a giggly romance mission, and we see some of the old sparkle.
Green Lantern (2011)
Rather than the launch of a franchise, it was the launch of a power couple, introducing Lively to her future husband, Mr. Mint Mobile. Looking back, is the great romance to come obvious? Is their chemistry captivating? Are they the Bogey and Bacall for our time? Eh …
Lively plays a girlboss named Carol who flies planes and does not like Hal’s (Reynolds) antics one bit. She glowers at him from beneath several layers of spray tan while wearing the hell out of an olive-green flight suit. She spends two of her scenes unconscious, the second time spinning hilariously in midair while one of the guys from Two Guys, A Girl and a Pizza Place faces off against swollen-headed Peter Sarsgaard (giving, no joke, the performance of a lifetime).
Legendary director Howard Hawks once decreed that a good movie is “three great scenes and no bad ones.” The Green Lantern is not a good movie, but it has one scene that is great, or at least, made me laugh pretty hard. Sir Lantern has recently rescued Carol and pops by her office (mansion?) for a visit. She thanks her superpowered savior, then recognizes who he is. “Hal? Hal? HAL? Oh my — oh my God. Oh my God, Hal!” She blurts out. “I’ve known you my whole life, I’ve seen you naked, you don’t think I would recognize you because I can’t see your cheekbones? What is this? Why is your skin green? Why are you glowing? What the hell is with that mask?”
Personally, I would love to see Blake and Ryan share the screen again. Specifically, in the “last great american dynasty” movie — though that’s looking less and less likely these days. It would work, though, mark my words.
Elvis and Annabelle (2007)
Elvis (Max Minghella) is the son of a hunchbacked, brain-damaged mortician (Joe Mantegna). He dreams of writing crime fiction, but after his mother’s suicide is stuck embalming bodies, a task for which his dad must take credit, as Elvis isn’t licensed yet. Annabelle (Lively) is a small-town beauty queen with an overbearing mother (Mary Steenburgen) and too-friendly stepfather (Keith Carradine). At the moment of her great pageant triumph, her bulimia-weakened heart gives out, and she drops dead. RIP. But hey, her Texas accent was pretty good, at least to my northerner ear.
Except! As Elvis preps Annabelle’s body for embalming, he has to stop when she … wakes up!
The best part of this Southern Neo-Gothic fairy tale (or maybe it’s a rejected Six Feet Under plotline) is their tender love story. The worst is Mantegna’s iffy portrayal of disability. The movie’s a little too weird to be the proving ground young Blake needed, but no one plays a broken-winged pretty bird like Lively.
Note: This is the first film in which someone kisses Lively’s DEAD BODY ON THE LIPS.
It Ends With Us (2023)
After years watching her late father abuse her mother, Lily Bloom (Lively) has become quiet and accommodating, and we get only glimpses of the joie de vivre that Lively can embody so well. It’s an appropriate choice for the character but does make the film kind of a downer for something that is, she insisted on the press tour, a tale of resilience, not a melodrama about domestic violence (by the way, it’s a melodrama about domestic violence).
Some actresses can make a character’s “low point” — like, say, getting beaten by her husband — tense and kinetic. Others simply make it maudlin. Lively is somewhere in the middle, heartfelt but somehow boring. Watching Lily, I didn’t feel moved, I just felt really bad for her.
It’s not that Lively can’t pull off dramatic acting (the scene where she asks for a divorce while holding her newborn is nuanced and sensitive), but I have a theory that her desire to be taken seriously is fundamentally at odds with her natural inclination to have a good time in life. Reading those much-discussed press moments charitably, I think Lively genuinely wanted us to “grab our friends and florals” because she is a generally pretty happy person who likes to look on the bright side and finds inspiration where others might see tragedy. Watch her make a Key lime pie while chatting amiably to the air and you’ll see what I mean. The more a role allows her to tap into some version of pleasure-seeking, the more she comes alive.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009)
Now this is how you utilize Blake Lively, people. She is beautiful, she is damned. Written and directed by Rebecca Miller, TPLOPL is a mess, tonally and narratively, but not half-bad as a character study, with Lively playing the teen/young-adult version of Robin Wright. She battles her pill-popping mom, gets caught up in psychosexual lesbian photo shoots, and drifts across the ’80s downtown art scene until falling for an older man (Alan Arkin).
This is her Penny Lane–in–Almost Famous moment, and she’s far more engaging than the soap that surrounds her. More than anything, it made me realize how badly I need Lively to get back into her highest heels and go whirling through clubs again. For a known teetotaler, she plays a wonderful femme fuck-up. Since she’s apparently allergic to romantic comedies and blockbusters, preferring to star in book adaptations, I hereby call upon the powers that be to get her the rights to Sarah Hoover’s The Motherload and Cat Marnell’s How to Murder Your Life. Just think of the looks.
The Age of Adaline (2015)
Otherwise known as “the movie where Blake Lively bonks her head and stops aging,” The Age of Adaline is a lot more grounded than exposition like “Von Lehman’s principle of Electron Compression in deoxyribonucleic acid, which will be discovered in the year 2035” might lead you to believe. Lively does an excellent job balancing the screenplay’s loftier pretensions — she eats madeleines while reminiscing, like Proust, get it? — with its fable-for-grown-ups quality, only tripping a little over heightened dialogue like, “I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m a good American. How dare you bother me at my place of employment?”
Lively feels a bit unmoored from the (undefined) stakes of it whatever’s going on in the first half, and that’s intentional; she’s a woman out of time, still styling her hair like it’s the ’40s. What the movie needs is a surer hand directing to reassure the viewer that this is all going somewhere. Instead, the scenes simply unfold one after another without much forward momentum, until the midpoint, when Harrison Ford shows up as Adaline’s (Lively) boyfriend’s dad, who was also Adaline’s boyfriend 50 years ago.
Now, what if I told you that not only is Harrison locked in, and not only do he and Lively have decent long-lost-love chemistry, but the whole thing is somehow … not creepy? And that’s not even the miracle. No, the miracle here is the guy they got for the flashbacks.
Allow me to go on the tiniest tangent. Twice now, Hollywood has tried unsuccessfully to sell us on a young actor having Harrison Ford’s rizz. Shia LaBeouf may look like he could have gotten half of his DNA from Indiana Jones, but he acts so uncomfortable in his own skin, I don’t buy it for a second. And poor Alden Ehrenreich was given the task of embodying a young Han Solo, which is not only impossible but downright embarrassing when you put him next to Donald Glover, who absolutely is young Lando Calrissian. All this to say, Anthony Ingruber, who plays the young version of Harrison’s character … kills it?
It helps that he literally does a Harrison Ford impression …
I’m assuming the Solo video is what got him an audition, if not the part outright. He has the voice, he’s sweet and handsome, and he doesn’t try to do too much “acting,” lending the flashbacks a dreamy, half-remembered quality that leaves the emotional weight to Ford. Ford lands the metaphorical plane in this movie in much the way he does not land literal planes in real life.
Tangent over. This movie is weirdly comforting, bye.
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005)
Ah, the set where Lively met her soulmate(s). To be honest, this movie is a bit too treacly for my taste, but the four main actresses’ enduring friendship warms my millennial heart.
Unable to deal with his daughter in the wake of his wife’s suicide (her umpteenth dead parent), Bridget’s (Lively) dad ships her off to an all-girls soccer camp, where she can’t get romantic attention from anyone appropriate, so she throws herself at a coach, only to find sex does not equal fulfillment.
At the time, her co-stars were established from Gilmore Girls, Real Women Have Curves, and Joan of Arcadia; Lively was an unknown. It was her first role, and she fit the part so well you’d be forgiven for thinking she wasn’t acting. If this is Sex and the City, she’s the Samantha. If it’s Girls, she’s the Jessa. Bridget is, per the voiceover, “wild” and “unstoppable,” attracting attention almost compulsively, performing carefree giddiness to cover deep sadness.
This will become the Lively default mode, her comfort zone; even if it isn’t the best possible use of her, she can deliver it consistently.
The Shallows (2016)
Tom Hanks in Castaway. Sandra Bullock in Gravity. Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant. James Franco in 127 Hours. The stranded lead of a survival story has a handful of crucial tasks: look disheveled but still hot because this is a movie; make it not too weird that you’re talking to yourself; react viscerally to the elements around you despite the fact that you’re probably on a soundstage; find multiple engaging ways to yell. What can I say except Lively freaked it?
Nancy (this girl’s name should be Chase or Georgie or Mia, but that’s basically my only note) is a med-school dropout surfing on a secluded Mexican beach (where her recently deceased mother once visited, Jesus Christ all Blake Lively’s parents are dead) when she gets chomped by a shark and has to not-die on a rock until rescue comes or the shark leaves. With only “Steven Seagull” for company, Nancy successfully uses her jewelry to staple her leg together (!) and unsuccessfully tries to eat a crab during the 60 minutes of an 86-minute movie that happens post-bite.
This is going to sound backhanded, but I don’t mean it that way: Lively isn’t necessarily elevated by having a great co-star to play off of. She has her lane, and when other actors meet her in it, it works. When they don’t, she can’t always adjust. She’s better in a lead role than a supporting one, and in The Shallows, with the screen to herself, she delivers. I’m telling ya, when I saw this in theaters we were hooting and hollering. When I watched it again at home, I hooted and hollered. It is so damn satisfying when she (spoiler) mercs that shark. In a bikini. Are you not entertained!?
The Shallows made so much money they put a Mandy Moore–versus-shark movie in theaters instead of VOD. If that’s not movie-star potential …
A Simple Favor (2018)
The only Lively flick I rewatch with any regularity, and the best. Gone Girl with more lip gloss, The Talented Mr. Ripley for bimbos (complimentary). This movie rules. Lively is Sharon Stone cold as Emily, a sociopathic fashionista who beguiles and manipulates Anna Kendrick’s perky supermom Stephanie, pulling off glam-bitch affectations that would swallow other stars whole. I believe her when she takes half an hour to make a martini. I believe her when she wears detached suit cuffs. Girl can bitch.
Director Paul Feig understands that Lively’s tendency to seduce every scene partner is a strength and lets her make out with Kendrick almost matter-of-factly (“you’re okay. You wanna order pizza?”), an act of off-hand domination, the natural conclusion to their girl talk, a tiny outlet for the simmering rage Emily can hardly be bothered to hide.
Any other actress would overplay it, ham it up, go for “camp” and tip her villain hand too early. But Lively could do this in her sleep. She’s almost bored, to the point you wonder if maybe she really is just a looker, a Hitchcock blonde with a sense of humor but nothing more beneath the surface. That’s when she’s got you right where she wants you. All this time, she’s been a chained tiger prowling the perimeter of her suburban cage. I can only hope the sequel unleashes the beast.
Paul Feig seems to specifically know how to harnesses her specific brand of vivacious, alluring, and just a little dangerous.
