{alltv} For Blake Lively, 'The Town' was an acting challenge

Thursday, September 16, 2010

{alltv} For Blake Lively, 'The Town' was an acting challenge

Absorbing a difficult character and letting her go was the key for Blake Lively in The Town.

"I'm not a Method actor who's all tortured and traumatized between takes," she says. "I thought I was actually wrong for not being that way. I thought if it was true acting, you had to do that. But when I worked on The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, I was able to see a few Academy Award-nominated actors, some of the best people in the business, and each had a different method, and each was the best at what they were doing. And I thought, 'Wow, you don't have to be really tortured.' You also don't have to be really happy between takes. It's whatever works for you."

And that, she says, was "really eye-opening since I'm still discovering my own method, my own technique."

Lively's Town character, Krista, "has been used and abused and just beaten in every way. She's so hardened … because of her environment, because of the world she lives in and how many doors were shut. But the amazing thing about her and the women of these places is that while they should be broken for so many reasons, they're still so strong, so resilient, so thick-skinned."

Krista, she says, "has just built a shield of protection. She loves that much more deeply, can handle that much more. It's not that it's any less painful when she loses someone she loves when they go to prison or commit suicide or want a different life, but it is more common so you just have to keep living."

Lively, 23, doesn't mean to sound all actor-y and catches the possibility of coming off as pretentious. But it's youthful exuberance, and the girl in her is still there in fits and starts.

"It was not like I'd be walking around feeling the pain of Krista all the time, but just those days (during filming) the results were so draining," she says. "The idea of living that life was so tragic that it was just nice to go home to my own bed and have an appreciation for my life and my world and my upbringing. Because who knows why you're dealt the cards you're dealt, and I felt really lucky to have the life that I have and the opportunity to dream. Because for Krista, dreaming is a fairy tale."