blake lively Playing the female lead in a first-tier superhero franchise is a great opportunity for any actress, but in “Green Lantern,” Blake Lively actually gets to do some butt-kicking alongside her co-star Ryan Reynolds, who plays the title character. Lively didn’t just have to square off against Reynolds’s formidable presence, but the hype and expectation that comic-book fans have going into one of the genre’s most highly anticipated adaptations. In the coming “Green Lantern,” Lively plays Carol Ferris, the feisty pilot who’s also the childhood sweetheart of Reynolds’s reluctant protector of the human race. Speakeasy caught up with Lively to talk about the movie. Speakeasy: How aware were you of “Green Lantern” comics before taking the role of Carol Ferris? Blake Lively:
I actually knew nothing about Green Lantern, and I imagined that nobody else in the world knew anything about Green Lantern. And as soon as I got the role I was quickly humbled about how naïve I was, because people just came out of the woodwork! I’m on [the “Gossip Girl”] set with a ton of New Yorkers, [and] they were grilling me about Star Sapphire, and Hector Hammond, and Parallax, and who’s going to be in it. But it’s also really exciting that I didn’t know anything about it because then my nephews don’t know anything about it. And to introduce a character to a younger generation, you have a lot more freedom and you’re not being compared to all the different incarnations that you’ve seen before, like the more commonly known superheroes. How much more intense has the scrutiny been for you, stepping into this role? Before I even took on the role, I felt the pressure to make the fans proud, to do the character justice. When there’s such history there and such a fan base, there’s a responsibility to do it right and to do justice to these characters that people love so much. So when we were on set, we had such an attention to detail; like, there was question of whether my hair would be blonde or brown, but to me it was never a question – Carol Ferris is a brunette and she had to be a brunette. And they tested 14 different shades of brown.
I flew out to North Carolina just to test the brown, three different weekends on camera. So with that kind of attention to detail, you can imagine how it was in the world of Green Lantern, in the suits, in the Corps, in the world of Oa. How much blue screen acting did you have to do, and how is that a different kind of imagination for an actor than pretending to be in any other situation? A lot of the stuff we did was with blue screen, and that’s very different because I’m used to being in scenes and having a good idea what it’s going to look like when the finished product comes out. But to be existing in a world that doesn’t even have life until we wrap? That you’re shooting for six months and then the movie starts is something very different, and makes it that much more exciting when you see it. Seeing those ten minutes of footage, I now feel like a fan of the movie whether I was in it or not. When things are just sitting in the room and man-made, there’s not that sort of life breathing through it in the way you can with CGI. Just like with Ryan’s suit – it’s comprised of energy and no fabric, no thread, could have conveyed that the way this CGI can, so it’s pretty exciting.
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