In her latest movie. All I See is You, actress Blake Lively plays her role as Gina, a woman who was blinded in a car accident as a child which is facing the changing of her world when she has an operation and restored her sight. The movie tells the story about her relationship to her husband, James, which played by Jason Clarke.
“It’s a beautiful relationship story and study of these two characters,” says Lively. “And the blindness can be metaphorical for what you choose to see and what you choose to ignore.”
Lively talked about her deep connection to Gina and how she prepared her role. Blake Lively and Clarke improvised their skill at the scene. They inspired from the real life and what their heart spoke about.
“It felt really exposing and intimate. I feel a little bad watching the film with my husband because there are moments I stole from my relationship,” mother of two daughter with her husband, Ryan Reynolds, continues, “There is a moment in the film where he’s lying in my lap and I’m laying over him and kissing his nose and asking him if it ever bothers him that he has to take care of me. And he says, ‘No, it makes me feel special.’”
Playing as a blind woman, Lively has a specific approach, “Something that I saw in movies is that people kept looking up at the ceiling while they were blind and talking to who knows who, but it’s because they’re really illustrating that they’re blind, so I thought that that’s what it was like. And then when you spend time with [blind people] socially, you know that sound is coming from there, I’m going to look here. But [the differences are] tiny, so it’s like instead of looking here I’m looking at you there. It’s hard sometimes for the camera to pick that up.”
Blake Lively discusses to Vanity Fair about the way in which male actors are given the chance that female actresses rarely are to play characters who seem like “assholes” on paper.
“I mean, my husband plays assholes [but], you go, ‘He’s so charming.’ Because he is likable . . . or you look at Harrison Ford as Han Solo and he’s like, ‘Get over here, sweetheart,’ and you just sort of [think], ‘Whoo, it’s so exciting and romantic and titillating.’ It’s because he’s charming and he’s loving and he’s not some sexist asshole . . . but, you don’t see that and think, ‘Oh, that guy’s not likable.’ But you would read on a page and you just know, Oh, it’s a man, he’ll be charming. But if you read that on a page as a woman they would never let you say that line because the note would always be, Oh, you just have to make sure she’s likable.”
