@Courtesy of Sony Pictures
Q: Did you have any hesitation in playing a woman who is experiencing domestic abuse?
Blake Lively: This story covers domestic abuse and domestic violence, but it also talks about omebody having a lifelong dream and realizing it, making it a reality. It covers your first love and a new love. It covers the highs and lows and every color of the human experience. It captured the messiness of the human experience and it felt very honest, very real, and raw. I understood why Lily made the decisions that she made when she made them. I felt for her and I wanted the audience to feel that as well.
I didn’t look at just one side of her life because I think she’s so much more than what happened to her. Yes, it can change the course of her life but it doesn’t define her. She defines herself. And that to me is beautiful. She’s not only a victim and she’s not only a survivor. She’s also multitudes. I think that to not be defined by the men in her life, whether it be her father or whether it be this beautiful love that she has, or whether it be this toxic love that she has, she’s never defined by the men in her life. That’s a beautiful story for any gender and any age. While that thing is very big and very potent there’s a lot of responsibility and care that needs to be handled with.
Q: When did your passion for movies and storytelling begin?
Blake Lively: This is all I’ve ever wanted to do since I was a little kid. There is nothing else that I love more. Movies have such an incredible capacity to help and influence people. Even if it’s something like a big-budget movie, that’s fun and silly, like Deadpool & Wolverine or if it’s something like It Ends with Us, that’s profound, emotional, and impactful, I’m grateful for all that. My siblings all acted, my sister Robin is an incredible actress, and my dad acted too. I grew up sitting with them in the audition rooms. They did this for a living and it wasn’t the glitziest version of it.
You saw the work that went into it and the rejection. And still, you have the love and care. You have to dust yourself off and get back up again. My parents actually had an acting class, I was a very shy kid but I would have to get up and do that and improv because my parents didn’t have a babysitter. And I love that because as a shy person, I love to get up and play. I love to play characters. I love to be forced. Um, my parents would make me be in the acting class, not because I was ever going to be an actor, but because if I was there, I was going to participate.
I saw people coming out to LA every year, and then some of them would fall off and not come back, give up after a couple of years. It was such a mixture of creativity luck, preparedness, hard work opportunity. I just grew up loving movies. Still to this day, if you come to my house, Turner Classic Movies is always on television. Even if it’s on mute, there’s just always an old movie playing in the background. We just love storytelling, we love making movies. It Ends with Us is a movie that we’re so proud of that I know that like, at the end of my days, this is one of the movies that I will look back on and say: “That’s one of my life’s work that I’m most proud of to be in it.”
Q: Did motherhood influence your relationship with the material and your understanding of Lily’s character?
Blake Lively: God. Yes. I took the relationships with my mother and my sisters, or my children and my feelings. It’s all over this film and I’m in ways that nobody will ever know, and I’ll never tell anybody. But I am sure that when I’ll sit in that theater with my loved ones, they will see themselves all over some of the scenes, and things we’ve said to each other. It Ends with Us is so personal to me. This story is told with empathy, she lives with empathy, and the storytelling leads with empathy. It’s never judging people for making the decisions they make, maybe making mistakes, and showing people that there is a way out. Maybe you are not always making the right decision at the right time, but you’re still a good person. You’re still valuable.
@Courtesy of Sony Pictures
Q : Did you interact with Isabela Ferrer, who plays the younger Lily?
Blake Lively: We had limited interaction on set. Isabela and I had the same mole. We both talk with our hands a lot. It’s a resemblance between us. She’s just so great in this movie.
Q : What kind of advice would you give to younger actors like Isabela?
Blake Lively: Be a fan and watch movies. You will learn so much from watching movies, watch movies like it’s your job. Watch movies from every period, from every genre, from every type of story, from every territory. You learn how to tell stories and learn about every facet of production. Once you start watching stories, you are taking something from everything. If you pay attention and you watch the storytelling, you can take something and learn something from it. We always do. You want to get as much perspective as you can, just different perspectives on the human experience.
Q: Last question: how was it to play Lady Deadpool in Deadpool & Wolverine?
Blake Lively: So much fun, Ryan and Hugh are the funniest men I know, I mean it. People should go to watch that blockbuster and then a more profound movie like It Ends With Us. And maybe in the future, I’ll do a sequel of both of them, titled It Ends with Deadpool & Wolverine!
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Here’s the trailer of the film.