When Did Blake Lively Get So Good?
With Emily Nelson, has Blake Lively finally found an awakening as an actor?
When I first read Darcey Bell’s A Simple Favor (the book), I knew almost immediately that it would make for a spectacular movie. And it did. When A Simple Favor released in 2018, it was everything one could’ve wanted. It had a lot to do with Blake Lively, though. Her Emily was the standout – the bad girl you were rooting for. I couldn’t have imagined her to be right for the part. But she was. Pitch perfect.
Seven years later, she still is. In Another Simple Favor. When did she get so good?
I’ll admit I might be falling on the ‘wrong’ side of the argument by making a case for Lively, considering that controversy involving her former co-star, Justin Baldoni, but I can’t not love Serena Van Der Woodsen, after all. I’ve always had a soft spot for her. But even I’m not biased enough to acknowledge that Lively hasn’t done much to break away from her Gossip Girl image. Her career had been, up until A Simple Favor, a classic example of an actor stuck within the confines of one specific image.
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When she got done playing Serena, it was almost like she became her. Incredible sense of style, check. Making news for her personal life, check. Social media virality thanks to those exchanges with her incredibly funny husband, Ryan Reynolds, check again. There were a few projects here and there, sure, but none landed the way they should. Nor did Lively make much of an impression with her performances. As fans, we were perfectly alright watching her picture-perfect life from afar, and we did. She didn’t seem to mind any of it either.
Until, of course, Paul Feig cast her as Emily Nelson in A Simple Favor, and Lively, the actress finally found an awakening.
Playing the wicked as hell Emily/Hope/Faith (if you know, you know!), Lively got the part right and how. She was sinister, savage and side-splitting. You were left wondering why someone hadn’t cast in her grey role before – she was that good. Without Emily, the film felt flat. You missed her when she wasn’t on screen.
The look, the expressions, the body language... everything about Lively felt spot-on for the part. It was like she was made to play Emily. Serena, who?
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And not just me but anyone who saw the film, agreed. You did too, if you watched it. If you haven’t yet, go, do so, right now.
Now, with Another Simple Favor, she’s given another incredible performance. The film is designed to be outlandish and camp, and Lively has certainly got that memo.
A few years after the plot of A Simple Favor ended, Emily is now out of jail and getting married in Italy. When she invites Stephanie (Anna Kendrick) to her wedding, she’s suspicious (as she should be) but heads to Capri nevertheless. And amidst the gorgeous Italian riviera, unfolds another tale of deception, drama and debauchery.
Her character gets even more complex and complicated this time but true to form Lively is brilliant in it, as expected. The film warrants her to be menacing yet melancholic, savage yet sad, and she does it all to great effect. Yes, the film has many moments which feel way too much, but her performance never misses a beat, nor does she allow you to look the other way.
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I couldn’t help but wonder: when did Blake Lively become this good of an actor?
Through all those trying-too-hard parts (The Age of Adaline, All I See Is You and The Rhythm Section), those lame commercial movies (The Green Lantern, Hick, The Shallows) and that unnecessary, never-ending rift during and around the making of It Ends With Us (the movie wasn’t even worth that drama!), Lively clearly has emerged as an actor who can have fun on screen.
If only she chooses to do that more often.