“”””””PLACE THE ORDER WITHOUT ANY HESITATIONS””””””

Blake Lively on Fame, Family, Good Fortune—And Becoming a Glamorous Jewel Thief for Baz Luhrmann

have come to meet a movie star, but it’s not a movie star who arrives—it’s a mother of four.

“Sorry about all the kids!” Blake Lively shouts merrily as she staggers under the weight of one child and pulls another along by the hand; a third wanders behind. We are at a terrace restaurant near the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome, and from here we can see the entire city in the slant of evening light, the famous hills and arc of the Tiber river, the marble monuments and ruins tinted pink and blue. Blake’s children are dancing and singing around their mother; it is a scene of joy and silliness and utter chaos, and she seems to be delighting in it. I tell her I’m not going to mention her kids in this piece, and she says oh you can mention them. “Sitting around with them doing chicken dances while I have a very serious conversation with you is probably the most accurate portrait of me possible. Did you bring cookies?” she asks, noticing the bag in my hand. I’d hoped to bake with her in the kitchens of the Rome Sustainable Food Project, which had sent along a batch; Blake is known as a world-class baker. “So sorry about that,” she says, brushing her hair out of her face. “I’d love to bake with you! But you can see my life….”

I’m not sure I can see her life, but I can sense it: in the sunny kindness in which she sends her children back to their hotel room, in the glee with which she attacks the cookies, in the almost nerdy enthusiasm she projects for Baz Luhrmann and the shoot they just finished for Vogue. Here is the wife of Ryan Reynolds, star of Gossip Girl, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, The Age of Adaline, and A Simple Favor—the sequel to which has brought her here to Rome. (She also has a new movie, It Ends With Us, out in August.) Here she is talking about Luhrmann not as a celebrity might but as the teenage girl she used to be, sitting in her bedroom in the San Fernando Valley and looking up at her signed poster from La Bohème.

“I’m just gonna go out on a limb and say Baz is my favorite director,” she states boldly. She is dressed in patched light­-colored jeans and pink-green patterned knits over a white T-shirt, her blond hair floating around her as she gestures. Her face, beautiful in its planes and shadows, faceted by the setting sun, is equally expressive. We have a few hours before Blake needs to head to hair and makeup and then, around midnight, to the Trevi Fountain to film a critical sequence of A Simple Favor 2. “I just love Baz so much. Because he celebrates love. Nobody does love like that.” I ask if that’s why she agreed to this shoot for Vogue. The three jeweled bracelets slip down her arm as she leans her head into her hand. “I’m a very shy person, so I don’t like doing photo shoots, really. Because when I’m acting, I’m playing a character. And I don’t…I don’t feel super comfortable in front of a camera. It’s part of why I don’t want to be in magazines. I know it’s not something I’m supposed to say—I mean, this is I think the first cover I’ve done in four years. Because I just,” she adds, becoming quiet as she goes back to the package of cookies. “I’m just too shy.”

“My life has become more intimate,” she explains, meaning she has been focused on her young children in recent years, and taking fewer movie roles. “But when they said Baz will do it, I thought, Okay, I’ve always wanted to work with Baz. Even if it’s just a week doing a photo shoot for Vogue, that’s still working with him. Seeing through his lens and how he tells stories.” She smiles, and with a little laugh adds: “Gracing these pages is not my gift to the world. I understand I’m lucky to do it.”

Order a copy to know more………….

Brand New Copies!! Newsstand Edition!! Magazine has a Barcode!!