“Are you hungry?” you ask. “Should we order something? I think I’ll order fish.” Then we move on to the subject of Halloween costumes…
“They’re superstars,” Hugh Jackman tells me over the phone from London, speaking of Blake and her husband. “They’re like old-school stars… and of course I’ve spent hours with them, like they’re in their pajamas and they’re walking around their house with their 900 kids and their dogs, and it’s very natural, and Blake will be baking and cooking and she’ll be like, ‘Let’s make pizza,’ and she’ll turn around,” he says of her changing for an event, “and there she is, this amazing star. She’s… she’s amazing to me.”
I ask him what he thinks about the transformation?
“She’s someone who’s comfortable in her own skin,” he explains. “You can’t make that happen. You can’t give it to someone else. She says she’s shy. And I believe that. I think there’s a shyness here. I’ve seen it before. Nicole Kidman and others have it. There’s a shyness, and it leads to this ability to transform and change. And she, like I said, walks around in her pajamas and then five minutes later—she’s Elizabeth Taylor! At the height of her beauty. And you’re like, What? How? It’s absolutely miraculous. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.”
Luhrmann spoke about this, too. “It may sound clichéd,” he told me, “but movie stars shine a light on themselves. They shine brightest on stage or on screen. And while they can be so honest and real, they’re also inspiring in their brilliance and humanity. I’ve seen it in movies, I’ve seen it in drama, I’ve seen it in music stars: you stand next to them and they’re so wonderful and human, and then they become giants on stage, right?”
Being with Blake Lively is not like being with any of her characters. Not with the elegant and gorgeous Emily Nelson from Simple known, The morally ambiguous Serena van der Woodsen is not from gossip girl, Even Lily Bloom is strong and hurting from her latest work, adapted from Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel. And it ends with us. It’s not like being with a celebrity who has every possible question asked and answers it with care and precision. It’s like being in a fast-moving river, a river that changes by the minute—from acting to film editing to business management to motherhood—and the current is strong and certain, so why not join in?
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