GLAMOUR: How long are you in Vancouver?
BLAKE LIVELY: My husband’s shooting Deadpool, and I’m here for the full shoot. We don’t work at the same time. We’re here as a family, then we’ll pack up, and I’ll go do a couple movies.
GLAMOUR: How does that work, when you have two people with amazing careers? It must require some careful negotiation.
BL: I admire people who find that what fulfills them is their art or their work, but what fulfills both me and my husband is our family. Knowing that, everything else comes second. We’ve each given up stuff we loved in order to not work at the same time. I’m fortunate to be in a place now where I get to find the material—a book or script—early and develop it. So I know ahead of time that I’m going to be working on this job at this time. And we can plan around it.
GLAMOUR: Do you agree with Reese Witherspoon that, to achieve parity in the industry, women need to produce their own stuff?
BL: I think it helps a lot. Nobody’s going to fight for you as much as you fight for yourself. That said, I know a lot of great men—directors, producers, studio heads—looking to tell stories about women, some because they’re drawn to those stories, some because they’re husbands or fathers and want to see the women in their life represented more accurately, and some just because they look at the numbers. They see, “Wonder Woman has replaced religion in America. We should probably invest in female summer movies.”
GLAMOUR: How do you feel the election changed your mind-set?
BL: It made me more aware, more conscious, more sensitive. Not just of sexism but of discrimination in all areas—class, gender, race. I had realized that there were problems [before]. You know, I do a lot of work against sex trafficking: There are hundreds of thousands of missing-children reports in the United States each year; some of those children are sex-trafficked. But that’s not reported. You see [stories about] only the wealthy, middle-class white girls who’ve been kidnapped. There are people missing all the time, and because they’re minorities, because they come from impoverished neighborhoods, they don’t make the news. That is so devastating.
GLAMOUR: I have a boy now, but I’m having a girl. And you have two girls. In this day and age, having a girl feels like a political act to me. What’s the message you want your daughters to receive from you?
BL: Sarah Silverman does a great bit that I’m going to butcher: “Stop telling little girls that they can do anything. They already believe they can do anything. It opens the door for questions….” We’re all born feeling perfect until somebody tells us we’re not. So there’s nothing I can teach my daughter [James]. She already has all of it. The only thing I can do is protect what she already feels.
GLAMOUR: When I’m reading my son a story, I’ll give the mom a job—“and she’s an astrophysicist”—even if the book doesn’t.
BL: I’m more conscious of language too: I was reading a script, and this woman, who’s very tough, did something where she took control of her life. And so she’s sitting, gripping the wheel, “a look of empowerment on her face.” And I thought, Hmm, they don’t point that out about men: “Look how empowered he is.” It’s just innate.
GLAMOUR: You’d have to point out if he weren’t empowered.
BL: Exactly. But with my husband, I’m lucky to have someone who is so conscious. My husband was like, “Why do I always say he?” And I said, “That’s what we’re taught.” So he’ll pick up, like a caterpillar, and instead of saying, “What’s his name?” he’ll say, “What’s her name?” Or we’ve joked that my daughter is bossy. But my husband said, “I don’t ever want to use that word again. You’ve never heard a man called bossy.”
Read the full interview at Glamour.
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