How Blake Lively Went from ‘Gossip Girl’ to Legit Movie Star in Four Unlikely Steps (and One Potato Chip)

There are not a lot of unequivocal movie stars under 40, especially if you don’t count Sonic the Hedgehog. There’s Timothée Chalamet, Margot Robbie, Michael B. Jordan… and Blake Lively? Love her or hate her, the former Gossip Girl star has worked to cultivate a genuine star image, at a time when so many big names have performed the reverse trajectory, jumping back into prestige TV from the once-rarified air of the movies. Given Lively’s gravity-defying insistence on a big-screen career, it’s baffling that Amazon has chosen to keep Another Simple Favor within the confines of streaming, even as they ramp up other theatrical releases. It’s especially galling because the original Simple Favor was arguably the fourth and final step in a career that brought Lively from The CW to a $350 million-grossing domestic drama with last year’s It Ends with Us. Regardless, there will be a lot of eyes on Lively once again as the movie premieres this weekend. Here’s how Lively charted that path from TV to cinema in four streamable movies:

1. Lively was still on Gossip Girl when she took a role as Kris, the druggie ex of Ben Affleck’s character (and sister to Jeremy Renner’s) in The Town. It’s not a big part; Rebecca Hall is the movie’s female lead. But putting Lively alongside Affleck, Renner, Hall, Jon Hamm, and Chris Cooper felt like a step up in maturity from the teenage ensemble of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movies. Some reviews said Lively came across like she was playing dress-up, but given the size of the role, it was far more important that she showed up and shook off her golden-girl image.

   Stream The Town on Peacock

2. After The Town, Lively appeared in an obligatory love-interest role in Green Lantern, from which she extracted her future husband Ryan Reynolds, but not much in the way of box office clout; the role was thankless and the movie was a flop. Until Another Simple Favor, any further involvement Lively took in big-budget franchise movies was marginal (voiceovers, mostly) and at the behest of Reynolds; her own starring vehicles were stubbornly retro. That’s even part of the text of The Age of Adaline, a Benjamin Button-ish romantic melodrama where Lively plays a woman whose aging process halts for decades after a freak accident. The movie isn’t terrific, nor was it a huge hit. But it performed respectably enough, and the fact that Lively was making a movie that felt like it could have come out in 1958, rather than casting about for a new franchise (ahem, Mr. Lively), seemed almost defiant as a statement of autonomy from Hollywood shlock.

   Stream The Age of Adaline on Peacock

3. And if Lively was going to do schlock, she was going to make it her own! In the fine tradition of the Hollywood scream queen, Lively played a grieving woman who finds herself stranded and pitted against a large, seemingly vengeful shark in this survival-horror thriller. It’s also arguably her best performance in arguably her best movie: A taut, stylish Jaume Collet-Serra thriller to which Lively brings a lot of feeling but not too much on-the-nose emoting. The mystique-generating opacity of her performances can read as blank or inexpressive sometimes, but here it provides a built-in restraint against overacting.

   Stream the shallows on starz

5. If some earlier Lively roles, like the blind woman regaining her sight in All I See Is You or the young woman at the center of a throuple in Savages, made her a sort of sexualized cipher, A Simple Favor crystalized an appropriately big-screen-sized version of a Lively persona: aloof, highly fashionable, willing to slink in and out of genres without breaking a visible sweat, sort of a femme fatale of girltalk. It was also her last signature hit before It Ends with Us, largely for lack of trying: As if conforming to her mom-noir role, Lively took plenty of time off throughout the past decade to focus on family. Her only starring role between Favor and Ends was the characteristically old-fashioned spy thriller The Rhythm Section.

   Stream A Simple Favor on Netflix

6. Bonus: The Potato Chip Sketch (2009)

   Back when her main gig was still Gossip Girl, Blake Lively hosted Saturday Night Live, and agreed to appear in one of the show’s strangest sketches – inheriting it, in fact, from her future bestie Taylor Swift, who played Lively’s part in a version that was cut from dress rehearsal on an earlier episode. The part in question? An assistant at NASA who backs up her boss (Will Forte) in castigating an unlikely job applicant (Jason Sudeikis) for stealing a single potato chip off of Forte’s desk. Apparently Swift played the part like a ’50s bombshell; Lively locks into the vibe of a Tennessee Williams play, and it’s glorious. She’s far from the only starlet to show off how game she could be on SNL, but her sterling work here (maybe this is actually her best performance?) feels unusually connected to the rest of her career.