8/30/2017
Blake Lively had quit acting. The blonde Tarzana, California, native—who, one imagines, leaves a trail of sunflower emojis and the scent of cupcake icing in her wake wherever she goes—had had enough. Eighteen years old at the time, she had just appeared in a small independent film and come to a crushing conclusion: “I realized that [acting] was a business as much as a craft,” she told me more than a decade after the fact, while on the West Coast, where her husband, Ryan Reynolds, was about to start shooting Deadpool 2. “People will go see your movie based on your standing and all of that, and it didn’t make sense to me because I was 18 and being an artist.” She decided, having deferred from college a year earlier, that she would jump off the Hollywood carousel and enroll in school.
It was at about this time, in 2007, that The O.C., a prime-time soap opera about beautiful, articulate, sun-kissed teenagers living in Orange County, was wrapping up its four-year run. The show had arrived on the scene with a tidal wave of buzz, its actors almost immediately splashed on magazine covers and pushed out onto red carpets; but after burning through plot at a rapid pace (its leading lady, Mischa Barton, saw her character get killed off somewhat unceremoniously in the third season), the show sputtered to a close, ending with a truncated final season. But The O.C.’s creators and show-runners, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, already had the beaches of Newport in their rearview mirror, with their sights on a next project. They had been sent Cecily von Ziegesar’s popular Gossip Girl book series, centered on a group of affluent, conniving New York private-school students. As soon as they finished reading the first book, the duo knew this was it. “We learned a lot of lessons [on The O.C.] and its kind of crazy four-year run that we wanted to take and apply to something moving forward, and we were really excited about doing something in New York,” Schwartz said over lunch in Los Angeles this past winter.
Meanwhile, a new television network, the CW, was simultaneously in the midst of a delicate birthing process. Formed by the union of the WB and UPN, the new network—led by then President of Entertainment Dawn Ostroff—was searching for an identity. “We knew we needed the defining show,” Ostroff (currently president of Condé Nast Entertainment) said. “You have to sort of catch the wind at your back. You have to really hit something that’s in the zeitgeist, or really going to matter to people in a way that becomes an emotional connection. And it was even more difficult for us, because we were going after a younger, more finicky audience.”
It was a perfect storm: a buzzy property, a hot creative team, and a new network. The official green light was a mere formality: Schwartz and Savage were off to the races.
Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Blake Lively, and Penn Badgley, at a gala at Cipriani Wall Street in October 2008.
Photograph by BILLY FARRELL/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images.
There were two core figures at the center of the books—Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen—and casting them was at the top of Schwartz and Savage’s agenda. Waldorf is a brunette queen bee—controlling, poised, meticulous. Van der Woodsen, by contrast, is the blonde, effortlessly cool free spirit. Blair, the Veronica, inspires fear; Serena, the Betty, inspires envy. When they started to cast the show, Savage and Schwartz looked at online message boards, where fans of the book series had already decided that Lively—known at this point primarily for her role in 2005’s The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants—would be the perfect Serena. “We didn’t see a lot of other girls for Serena,” Schwartz said. “She has to be somebody that you believe would be sitting in the front row at Fashion Week eventually.”
Lively was not completely sold, though. “I said, ‘No, I want to go to college. Thank you, though.’ Then they said, ‘O.K., you can go to Columbia [University] one day a week. After the first year [of the show], it’ll quiet down. Your life will go back to normal and you can start going to school. We can’t put it in writing, but we promise you can go.’ So that’s why I said, ‘O.K. You know what? I’ll do this.’”
When I asked Lively if that arrangement ended up working out (even though I already knew the answer), she responded, laughing: “This is advice to anyone: when they say, ‘We promise, but we can’t put it in writing,’ there’s a reason they can’t put it in writing.” She added, “But no, the show didn’t slow down. It just got more and more.”
If every generation has its one or two shows that prove defining, that essentially everyone seemed to watch as if there were no other choice in the matter, Gossip Girl—which is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its premiere this September—would be that show for anyone who was a teenager or twentysomething (or, in many cases, older than that!) when it first aired. The show premiered before Instagram or Snapchat had launched, and before Facebook and Twitter had become the juggernaut forces they are today. But the premise of the series—an anonymous blogger, who goes by “Gossip Girl,” monitors the goings-on of a small group of glamorous Upper East Side high-schoolers—predicted, to an almost eerie extent, what was to come for our culture. The notion of a group of people being callously gossiped about online by an anonymous troll certainly has resonance in our current climate, in which celebrities (as well as politicians and public figures) are often blogged about with a blithe and biting disregard. As Kristen Bell, who voiced “Gossip Girl” for the show, said to me, “[Schwartz and Savage] were spearheading: ‘What if the Internet is just a place to judge people? What if that’s what it turns into?’ And they turned out to be Nostradamus.” (On a meta level, the actors on the show were among the last wave of young television stars who were not broadcasting their every move on social media—which perhaps helped to create a certain air of mystery and intrigue about them, one that doesn’t exist in the same way for young television stars now.)
The show also debuted at the very end of the period during which people regularly watched shows live when they aired (as opposed to on their DVRs or laptops or phones). As Ostroff put it, “It holds such a place in pop culture and in society where people just really say, ‘I remember everything around that show. I remember where I was [when watching it] and what I was doing in my life.’”
Viewers wanted to dress like the characters; they wanted their haircuts and jewelry and ringtones; they wanted to talk like them and listen to the music they listened to. At some New York City private schools, the show—which featured its lead characters partaking in all sorts of illicit antics—was in fact “banned,” which of course only served, in all likelihood, to make the students want to watch it more. New York magazine featured the (scantily clad) cast of the show on its cover toward the end of the first season, proclaiming in its cover headline (only semi-tongue in cheek), “BEST. SHOW. EVER.”
At its core, though, while the fashion and music and Lively-ness of it all no doubt drew a large swath of viewers, the central, relatable dilemmas faced by the main characters—Blair and Serena, as well as Brooklyn “lonely boy” and eventual Serena boyfriend Dan Humphrey, ostentatious bad boy and Blair soul-mate Chuck Bass, and pinup prepster Nate Archibald—were what kept people tuning in. “Phones get updated, but the inner life of teenagers, and the things that they struggle with, are pretty timeless, regardless of what device they’re on,” Schwartz said.
At many New York City private schools, the show—which featured its lead characters partaking in all sorts of illicit antics—was in fact “banned.”
There was no shortage of high-profile guest stars throughout the run, either, as luminaries from the world of fashion, publishing, music, and art appeared on the series. Lady Gaga performed “Bad Romance” on the show, right as she was approaching the height of her fame; David O. Russell filmed a multi-episode arc, as, yes, a director. And, that’s right, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner made an appearance, in a club scene filmed at the Boom Boom Room. (“They did it for the money,” Schwartz said, with a laugh.) Trump said in an interview at the time that she never missed an episode of Gossip Girl. “I think I’m a cross between Blair Waldorf and Lily van der Woodsen when it comes to the style,” she told InStyle.
While the show was as zeitgeist-y as zeitgeist-y gets, Gossip Girl never did particularly well in the ratings. But it has enjoyed a continuing popularity, even 10 years later. It’s currently available on Netflix, where a new generation is discovering the show for the first time. (Chace Crawford, who played Nate, noted, “It’s so weird how the same demographic has been frozen in time. Fourteen- to 20-year-olds still come up to me freaking out and it’s because they binge [the show] on Netflix.”) And in other countries, the show has come to represent the allure and glamour of New York. Nearly every cast member I spoke with—from Crawford to Wallace Shawn—reported that they, to this day, are regularly stopped by foreigners who recognize them from the show. Ostroff recalled that, about seven or eight years ago, she had a meeting with Chinese executives, who told her that the most illegally streamed show in China was not C.S.I. or Lost, but Gossip Girl.
During the filming of the pilot in 2007—the cast now assembled in New York—Schwartz and Savage felt confident they had magic on their hands. In addition to Lively as Serena, they had cast relative unknowns Leighton Meester, Crawford, Penn Badgley, and Ed Westwick as Blair, Nate, Dan, and Chuck, respectively. Savage remembered an early cast outing as the moment it hit her that things were clicking: “We all went to see Blades of Glory and [we were] walking with them [and thinking], ‘I don’t know what the rest of the world is going to think, [but] when I see these kids together, I feel excited.’” The actors felt they were a part of something that could be quite special, as well. Crawford said he remembers meeting Meester at his audition and thinking, at first, “I just don’t see her as Blair Waldorf. I can’t see it.” But then she turned around “slyly in her chair,” with Blair’s soon-to-be-trademark headband on, and she snapped into character. “I just remember thinking, ‘That girl can act. She’s the perfect girl for this.’” Schwartz recalled Meester’s audition, and her determination to get the part, vividly: “She came in and she was really funny, and really smart and played vulnerable. But there was one problem: she was blonde. And Blake was blonde, obviously; Serena had to be blonde. So, [Leighton] went to the sink and dyed her hair. She wanted it.’”
Lively said, frankly, she was scared about the attention that was to come. “I’m actually a very shy person and the idea of losing my anonymity was one that was scary to me,” she said. “I remember saying when I read this script, ‘Whoever does this will not be able to walk out of their house ever again and be the same as before they started this.’ You could tell it was a cultural phenomenon. That was both exciting and thrilling, but also very scary.” (Meester, who actually auditioned first for Serena before telling the producers she felt she was a better fit for Blair, was a bit more blasé in reflecting on the project’s beginnings: “I think it was just the normal, typical pilot season audition for me. . . . I auditioned and then I tested once and then we did a screen test with everybody. And then, that was it . . . I dunno. I got it.”)
All from Everett Collection.
On the precipice of what promised to be great fame, Texas native Crawford and Westwick, a young Brit in America on a work visa, decided to move into a two-bedroom apartment in Chelsea together. (Schwartz and Savage said they were adamant about casting Westwick, who had initially auditioned to play Nate; when the network asked them to prep a backup in case his visa situation did not work out, the duo refused.) Before the show had even aired, but after casting had been announced, Westwick and Crawford were already getting swarmed when they ventured out in the wild. Crawford recalled attending an Arctic Monkeys show with Westwick, where they got a sense of what their future might hold. “We had these girls coming up to us, and they were kind of freaking out about it: ‘Oh, we love the books.’ [Ed and I] kept looking at each other like, shit, man.”
The CW moved ahead with the series after seeing the pilot, and Ostroff now says the show was essentially to the CW what House of Cards is seen as for Netflix—the singular series that came to represent an entire network. While Schwartz and Savage were able to develop an audience over the fall, it was the spring of 2008 that the show really hit its stride, in part thanks to the timing of the writer’s strike. “The CW, because they couldn’t just run repeats or game shows, [Gossip Girl is] all they had,” Schwartz said. “They kept re-running the show during the strike so more and more people were watching.” The show’s return was preceded by a controversial “OMFG” marketing campaign, featuring stills of the cast in states of undress, with pull quotes saucily warning that the show was, “Every parent’s nightmare” and “Mind-blowingly inappropriate.” (Again, what better way to make sure teenagers did whatever it took to watch?) When the writers returned to craft the new batch of episodes post-strike, “people knew what the show was,” executive producer Joshua Safran said.
It was not long before packs of paparazzi were stalking the set, not dissimilar from the way in which “Gossip Girl” and “her” sources snapped Serena and Blair on the show itself—and it was impossible for the cast to so much as walk to set without getting swarmed. Hairstylist Jennifer Johnson said, “I had a little S.U.V. at the time and I had it parked out front of our location at the school. There were just so many fans everywhere, and when we wrapped at the end of the day, there were handprints all over my car. It was like the Beatles were inside.” Sam Robards, who played Nate’s father, laughed as he remembered what it was like to shoot scenes with Crawford: “It was a Friday night around midnight, and we were up on Fifth Avenue and 95th Street, and I looked across the street and there were, like, 200 kids with cell phones, and I said to Chace, ‘Hey buddy, there are 200 kids on a Friday night in the city [here] . . . and they ain’t taking my picture.’” Michelle Trachtenberg, who played impeccably dressed menace Georgina Sparks, said she remembers fans trying to “pet [her] hair” as she made her way through the set: “I opened up my trailer door to see, literally, on my first day, I think 40 paparazzi. That’s when I was like, ‘O.K., I need my own bodyguard.’”
Crawford said while he didn’t necessarily mind the frenzy at the time, he reflects on it now somewhat differently. “I think I used to feel like I was fine with it, but looking back on it from a different perspective now, I never really got used to it. . . . I’m a private person and I don’t like being the center of attention.” Meester was somewhat flippant about the initial fan attention: “I think they were mostly there for the guys.”
While Sex and the City had blazed the trail for a New York-based show that enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the worlds of fashion and commerce, Gossip Girl set trends for the coveted 18 to 34 demographic in a particularly emphatic way. “It was very clear from the beginning that we wanted to editorialize television and give it this high-fashion, international flair,” costume designer Eric Daman explained. Savage said, “We talked about how the show, on the one hand, is telling this fictional story about these characters, but it’s also kind of working as a lifestyle magazine.”
Johnson, who remains close friends with Lively, said she was amazed to see how much interest there was in how Lively’s hair was styled, comparing it to Jennifer Aniston’s iconic haircut on Friends: “A lot of magazines would call and want to do interviews on how you get the ‘Serena look.’ . . . It was like ‘the Rachel look.’” A 2008 New York Times story noted, “Merchants, designers, and trend consultants say that Gossip Girl . . . is one of the biggest influences on how young women spend,” with a Bloomingdale’s fashion director explaining that the show had had a “profound influence on retail.” Daman said, “When we came back with Season 2, so many designers were lining up and wanting to be a part of it—they wanted their stuff on either Blake or Leighton.”
Daman said the bold looks Westwick’s Chuck Bass, ostensibly the show’s romantic male lead, wore on the show—which involved purple suits, patterned handkerchiefs, and bowler hats—had a profound impact on the marketplace, as well. “I think because he was a Brit and had a different understanding of clothing and what it means, he was game day one,” Daman said. “He had a very big influence on menswear and how men dress today, and on what getting dressed up means. Menswear, at that point, was still very Jersey Shore. . . . I’m very proud we got to break through to the men and be like, ‘No, it’s O.K. to dress up. You’re not gonna look like some big pansy because you’re in a fucking suit, dude. Suck it up, put on the bow tie.’”
While men may have taken fashion cues from the show, they perhaps gleaned other recreational benefits from it as well. Zuzanna Szadkowski, who played Blair’s housekeeper (a fan-favorite character), said she remembers “a guy coming up to me who had a suit and a briefcase, this total Wall Street Guy, and he was all like, ‘Oh my god, Dorota!’ He told me, and a couple of other guys have told me this, too, that they used to watch the show because it was a great way in with the ladies.”
While the tabloids may have desperately hoped for some Lively-Meester on-set friction, this, by all first-hand accounts from those involved with the show, was not the case—though, god knows, that did not stop the tabloids from conjuring such tales. “It’s funny,” Trachtenberg said, “Because when we were filming, there was, ‘Leighton hates Blake, Blake hates Leighton, everyone hates Blake, everyone hates Leighton, everyone hates Chace,’ and blah, blah, blah. It really wasn’t. We were all chill. It was cool.” Makeup artist Amy Tagliamonti explained, “I have to say there was too much work to do for things to be that dramatic behind the scenes. It’s not like [the actors] were trying to get followers for Instagram; nobody was trying to do all the things that I feel like people do now, like, ‘Let’s get attention.’ Everyone was just doing their thing.”
Safran—who was Savage and Schwartz’s second-in-command and who wrote nearly every premiere and finale of the series—had this to say about the two leading ladies: “Blake is very much in the moment. Blake knows what’s happening. She knows this movie’s coming out, this band is happening. You talk to Blake on a very contemporary level, and she would be like, ‘I’m doing this thing tonight. Have you been to this restaurant?’ Leighton was very removed and very quiet, and, after her scenes were done, she would wander the stage. I had this image of her just in these gorgeous dresses with a book in her hand, sort of a little bit out of focus out in the corners.” But even though they may have had different demeanors, the two got along just fine on set: “Blake and Leighton were not friends. They were friendly, but they were not friends like Serena and Blair. Yet the second they’d be on set together, it’s as if they were.”
Lively’s life ended up mirroring and then eclipsing that of Serena, the character she was playing. “It was funny,” Schwartz said, “When we first started talking to Blake, it was like, in order for this show to work and for you to be the ultimate New Yorker, you’re going to have to host Saturday Night Live and be in a Woody Allen movie.” “And be on the cover of Rolling Stone,” Savage added. (Lively has by now checked all three of these achievements off her list.) When Lively first appeared on the cover of Vogue, Schwartz remembers thinking, “Oh my god, this is . . . Blair’s nightmare. It really felt like life imitating art.” Costume designer Daman noted, recalling Lively “running around on Christian Louboutin’s moped” when they filmed a few episodes of the series in Paris: “I feel like Serena and Blake definitely had a symbiotic relationship: in their lives and in the show.”
From left: by James Devaney/WireImage, by Justin Campbell/BuzzFoto/FilmMagic, by Jeffrey Ufberg/WireImage, by Justin Campbell/BuzzFoto/FilmMagic.
For the first few seasons of the show, Lively was dating Badgley—their characters dated on the show, as well—but the two were careful to keep the relationship largely hidden from the public eye. “The shocking thing was, I found out on the set of the Season 2 finale that Blake and Penn had broken up months before,” Safran said. “They kept the breakup hidden from the crew, which you could never do now. I don’t even know how they did it. They kept it from everybody which is a testament to how good they are as actors. Because they did not want their personal drama to relate to the show.”
Lively said she now sees that those in power likely were thrilled about the fact that her personal life was receiving as much attention as it was. “Stepping back from it, I can see it,” she said. “But I remember there was one point where we were just afraid of how our personal lives overlapping our work life could be perceived by our bosses. [But then] we were like, ‘Oh no, that’s exactly what they want.’ They wanted us all to date. They wanted us all to wear the same clothes that we’re wearing on the show. They wanted that, because then it fed their whole narrative. People could buy into this world.”
I asked Lively if it was ever surreal or strange to have her own life seemingly bleed into Serena’s and vice versa. She responded emphatically that, in fact, playing Serena only clarified for the actress how much her real life was not like her character’s. “At the time,” Lively says, “I was wearing the same clothes and doing fashion shoots, and dating the same person that my character was dating—or sometimes that person [Dan] was my brother, you never know with Serena—and because of that, what people were projecting onto me was that I was Serena . . . We look the same, and we acted the same as far as they could tell, because I wasn’t doing anything but that show. If [Badgley and I] were photographed walking down the street, they didn’t know if it was a paparazzi shot or if it was a shot from the show. . . . At the time, what was heightened was, wow, it all looks similar from the outside, but it’s so different on the inside.”
Badgley—who declined to be interviewed for this piece—has spoken publicly, since the show ended, about his displeasure with aspects of the series. “Penn didn’t like being on Gossip Girl, but . . . he was Dan. He may not have liked it, but [his character] was the closest to who he was,” Safran said, in reference to Badgley’s sardonic, outsider, Brooklyn-dwelling character, who pined for Serena for a long time before eventually dating her, and then no longer dating her by series’s end.
Towards the close of the show’s run, as might be expected for any television show producing 20 or more episodes almost every year and featuring a slew of gorgeous young stars with an increasing number of career options, the cast became restless. Meester was pursuing a pop music career on the side. Taylor Momsen—who played rebellious Jenny Humphrey—left the show to record and tour with her rock band, the Pretty Reckless. (Kelly Rutherford, who played Serena’s mom, remembered: “You’d walk by the dressing rooms and everyone would be doing their music.”) “Some of the actors were not entirely happy to be there after a certain point,” Safran explained. “And no matter what we did, they were never going be happy. . . . They were kids. They were young.”
Billy Baldwin, who played Serena’s father, recounted Lively getting a call from set one day informing her she’d been offered a movie role opposite Billy’s brother Alec. “She goes, ‘Yeah, he’s gonna play my husband.’ And I said, ‘So in what universe is it just or right or fair that he plays your husband and I play your father?’ And she started laughing and said, ‘That makes you Alec’s father-in-law.’ And I was like, ‘Say that again and I’m gonna stab you with a pen or something. Or, like, break your kneecap.’”
Lively asked for the show to shift production to Los Angeles while she filmed the 2012 movie Savages, directed by Oliver Stone. She began dating Leonardo DiCaprio, which also—inadvertently, thanks to her innovative means of communication with the actor—came to influence the content of the show itself. “We learned a lot from Blake,” Safran said. “When I think about shooting the L.A. episodes, Blake was dating [DiCaprio] at the time, and she had this thing where she had a doll that she took photos of that she sent to Leo. Blake was way ahead of the curve. It was pre-Instagram. She was documenting her life in photographs in a way that people were not yet doing.”
Lively herself said that she doesn’t think of her work on the show so much like acting as she does being part of a machine. “It didn’t really feel like acting as much . . . It felt like we were in the center of a marketing machine, a cultural pop phenomenon. We were creating three episodes at once sometimes, we were given our lines at the very last minute, we didn’t know where our characters were going; there was no planning or arc. . . . It almost felt like a sketch show. We were basically sort of reading off of cue cards. There were people taking pictures the whole time and paparazzi jumping in front of the cameras—it felt like we were part of a cultural experiment.” She concluded, with a very Lively graceful landing, “There was something neat about that.”
“It didn’t really feel like acting as much . . . It felt like we were in the center of a marketing machine, a cultural pop phenomenon.”
While the interest in the show from the actors may have been waning by the show’s end, there was still enough for Russian hackers—again, Gossip Girl very ahead of the curve!—to attempt to infiltrate the show’s database in the fourth season. “All season, our scripts were ending up online, and we couldn’t figure out how,” one of the producers on the series explained. “We hired a private investigator. We didn’t understand what was happening, because everything was getting leaked, every detail. . . . A teenager, I think either [from] Russia or Bulgaria, had hacked one of the writer’s e-mails, and was selling scripts on eBay. But they were underage, so they couldn’t be prosecuted. It was a fucking production nightmare. We would have to ‘X’ out every script. We would have to print on red paper. . . . It was like there was a ‘Gossip Girl’ in our system.”
As it turned out--spoiler alert, if you’re one of those people working your way through the series for the first time now on Netflix—“Gossip Girl,” on the show, was revealed in the series finale to be Badgley’s character, Dan Humphrey, a decision that was seen as somewhat controversial, given it was tough to work out logistically how Dan would have been able to maintain the blog. (Both Nate and Eric van der Woodsen, Serena’s brother, had been considered as potential “Gossip Girls” by the writers earlier in the show’s run.)
Someone should let Ed Westwick know about the Dan reveal, though. The actor e-mailed me, in response to a question about favorite plotlines or memories from filming: “I still am not sure who GG was lol.”
The last episode of Gossip Girl aired in 2012, but the show’s continued relevance means that there is talk about revisiting the franchise. Many of the cast members seem quite excited by the notion. Wallace Shawn—who played Blair’s stepfather, Cyrus Rose—practically shouted, “Oh, I would jump at it.” Rutherford said, “I would be completely on board. And I think they should do it soon.” Lively? “Of course. I’m open to anything that’s good, that’s interesting, and that sort of feels necessary. . . . I imagine we all would [consider it]. I can’t speak for everyone else, but we all owe so much to this show, and I think that it would be silly not to acknowledge that.” (Aside from Lively, the other young cast members have had trouble finding traction with film roles since the show’s end.)
When I asked Meester if she would ever want to revisit the character of Blair now, given rumors of a reboot or reunion, she responded, deadpan, “Yeah, I don’t really hear [talk of] that . . . I guess I hear that in fits and starts here and there, but it’s hard to say. If everyone was into it and if the timing was right, you know?” She trailed off, “I don’t want to say, ‘No, never . . .’”
Schwartz and Savage told me they think they “could be persuaded [to revisit the world of Gossip Girl] if there were new stories to tell.” New Line briefly flirted with producing a “new version” of the franchise as a film, though it has not moved forward. Von Ziegesar, who wrote the Gossip Girl books, told me that she would love to see a take of Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer, a horror adaptation she published in 2002 based on her original installment (in this version, “Serena comes back from boarding school to kill everyone”).
At one point during my conversation with Safran—which took place in the very thematically appropriate King Cole Bar at the St. Regis hotel—he said that “the saddest thing that has happened is that network television has decided that it is not important to tell aspirational stories.” He assessed, “Every show on any television network right now has a murder in it, or is dour. . . . We were working [on Gossip Girl] feeling like, ‘O.K., this is the beginning of something,’ and when I look back on it, it was almost like the end of something, actually.”
, when it was reported that she had--quite unjustly--been asked to uncross her legs at a fashion show. We will reiterate here: if Blake Lively wants to come to your fashion show, you should just emanate thankfulness, bow your head in the direction of the Serena van der Woodsen poster in your office, and then let her sit however she damn pleases.](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sL6PaYPiAF73xYY925n3dBCUxWa-3Ere78uDBCgTG8Wv34wNQWVusHJqtTAXqi0YXam2GKYxxffg=s0-d)
 with __Jimmy Fallon__ that her daughter James believed that Fallon was her dad, due to some confusion related to a Fallon cardboard cutout in their home. That Lively, an unexpected goofball.](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_to3o-EtmwvsWkaMO6TDcMsaZpjIIp1zEGt6C-002A-utq4MXJ9Bq0Bl0iXWuzPscRhfItanrlOaw=s0-d)
, born this fall, for Reynolds’s [Walk of Fame ceremony](http://ift.tt/2wIVlLf) and their first public appearances.](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_ufSL_hxtXK6_8Hcqw_G-t1BywU7Mnfk5RwU1BJSvKOUFyhM8BbqVtTzvAwDqWNM8ushgvkbLCF6Q=s0-d)
The year began for Lively with the release of the movie her husband, Ryan Reynolds, had fought to make for years, Deadpool. The film would go on to be nominated for two Golden Globes in December and become the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time.
By Dave Alloca/StarPix/Rex/Shutterstock.
By Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images.
Lively and Reynolds attended a state dinner in March where they met the Canadian prime minster, Justin Trudeau.
By Andrew Harnik/A.P. Images/Rex/Shutterstock.
Few provide the Met Ball red carpet with as much “Look. At. Me” glamour—usually with a touch of Old Hollywood—these days as Lively does.
By Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images.
By David M. Benett/Getty Images.
Lively was widely seen as the breakout star of the Cannes red carpet, and the dress that seemed to be the standout crowd-pleaser was this “Elsa” gown.
By Gisela Schober/Getty Images.
Courtesy of CTMG, Inc.
Seriously, though, and at the risk of overdoing it, The Shallows was enjoyable and suspenseful, and Lively—seen here at one of the premiere events—turned in a heartfelt, engaging performance.
By Michael Stewart/Getty Images.
“Full Jesse Spano” is how Lively captioned this one on her Instagram account.
By James Devaney/GC Images/Getty Images.
If you have never seen this photo before, well, we don’t know what to say to you. This is Lively (pregnant at the time), and, yes, the squad led by Taylor Swift, in the ocean off Rhode Island over July Fourth.
From AKM-GSi.
From NBC/Getty Images.
By Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images.
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