Blake Lively talking about her new movie The Town

"I can snap into Serena very easily. The way I dress as Serena is pretty much the way I dress as me. I'm living in New York City, shooting in New York City. I'm in a comfort zone."

Blake is talking about career choices, which you'd think would seem monumental to her at this point.

"I surround myself with people I trust, but ultimately it's my gut. That's what I trust. Because I could be swayed any which way — I'm not saying I'm a person who can be swayed easily, but one can be swayed any which way. People will talk to me and something that I'm against at first will then seem like a good idea, but I always end up saying no to that thing, because it's like when you do SAT questions. Go with your first choice. It's been proven that your first choice is often the right one. It's like 56 percent of kids — your first instinct, if you don't know the answer to something, that's the right one."

The Town is about as far from Gossip Girl as a movie could be. It concerns bank robbers in Charlestown, Massachusetts, a tough place across the Charles River from Boston. Lively's character is a single mom who's also a drug mule. She gets the crap beaten out of her in one scene.

"It was crazy, it was super-duper crazy."

Jon Hamm, the Mad Men star, plays an FBI agent in The Town. The first words out of his mouth about Blake are "She's a very self-confident person. And I think a big part of that comes from being on a TV show and getting that experience of acting every day. It's a long slog. You realize, 'Okay, I'm either going to be professional and diligent about this, or I'm just going to use this as a stepping stone to something else,' and I think she's chosen wisely in that respect. I'm certainly not the ultimate marker of what is a good actor and what is a bad actor, but I know what I'm up against and what I'm acting with, and she was fantastic. She's in it to win it."

Blake continues "I have a sex scene in this film, and that's never comfortable. You think, Oh, that's going to be so awkward. But this scene isn't supposed to be a steamy one — it's sort of tragic, because this girl is so desperately trying to keep this man interested. It's more intimate than most sex scenes. I'm pretty much crying in it. You're worried about all the awkward things, but then I talked to Jeremy Renner about it — he plays my brother — and he just said it's all in the eyes. The rest of it will come."

"Every scene that I had was a heavy scene, I mean the scenes were — I hate to sound dramatic, but they were cataclysmic. I'm screaming, I'm crying, I'm fighting, I'm on drugs, I'm in the hospital. They were all very, very rough. Rough to perform, rough to watch or to experience. But they were rewarding, because you feel like, wow, I can do that. I did that."

On one of the last nights of filming in Charlestown, some of the cast and crew were at a pub. There were extras there, too — locals whom Affleck had asked to basically play themselves. Lively was in costume, and a local guy hit on her. She was with a few women she had spent a lot of time with preparing for the role — the kind of women she was portraying. "And this older man, in his fifties, came up and started hitting on me, He goes, 'Oh, I've never seen you around here before.' And they said, 'She's the girl in the movie!' And he's like, 'Really? I thought you were a townie.' And I said, 'Well, I guess that's a good thing.' When he walked away, they told me he just got out of prison a couple of months ago after eighteen years. There are plenty of people who would love to be extras in a Ben Affleck movie, but he had the real deal in there. I found out every single man in that bar was a bank robber that had been in prison."

Lively grew up in Los Angeles in a show-business family. Her father, Ernie, is an actor, her mother, Elaine, is a talent manager, and her four siblings are all actors. She used that. She says she never planned to be an actress, but she paid attention growing up. She knew that to make that guy in the bar — and Affleck and, she hopes, the viewing public — believe that she was a local required more than makeup and fake finger-nails. It meant hanging out with the women in Charlestown to make herself better in the part while also understanding that she could hang out with them for ten years and she still might suck.

"As you're fighting for the job, you have to tell yourself, I'm the only one that can do this. And then I get it, I'm like, Oh, shoooot, I have no idea what I'm doing. Who was I kidding? I just watched Dog Day Afternoon and I thought, I want to quit acting. But it's also something that I love. I don't know. I think that you're just gonna do it your own way. Acting — you're just portraying a human, and there's billions of humans in the world. Who's to say that it's wrong or inaccurate?"

Affleck had never seen Gossip Girl when he hired her. Even before Lively read for the part, she traveled to Charlestown on her own to get a sense of her character and the Boston accent. "The whole movie kind of hinges in a lot of ways on her performance, and I knew it was going to be the hardest part to cast," Affleck says. "This girl came in, and no one had said to me beforehand, 'Hey, look for this person.' And obviously she was really attractive, and so I thought, Oh, here comes some blond girl. She came in, did one reading, and just crushed it. Like, Boston accent — really good. I was sort of stunned. I said, 'Jeez, you know, that was really fucking good. Who are you?' She didn't mention that she was on a television show."

The only obstacles, Affleck says, were that Lively was too pretty and too young, and that she had this monster hit show she had to shoot five days a week. So they fiddled with the character's age and scheduled all her scenes to shoot on weekends. "I just said, 'Look, there's no alternative. I don't have a second choice,' " Affleck says. He's still in the middle of editing the movie, which won't be out until September, but he says he wants to make a point right now. "I want to be on the record because I think she's really going to blow up, and I want to look like the smart guy, I didn't quite discover her, but at least I want to say I bought the stock when it wasn't $500 a share."

Blake about the state of her life: "I know everybody compares it to a roller coaster, but this is like the part of the roller coaster where maybe you've already taken a big dip, but then there's going to be another unexpected one. A big loop. It feels like something else is going on."

xoxo,
Vicky