After just a few months of auditions, she nabbed the part of Bridget in 2005’s The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, which she filmed between her junior and senior years at Burbank High, and decided that maybe acting wasn’t a bad way to spend her days. Since graduation she’s been working nonstop, appearing in a couple of small, largely forgettable movies before being cast as Serena van der Woodsen in Gossip Girl last year. “I’ve been learning as I’m going along,” she says of her ad hoc career strategy. “I thought, Okay, I’ll try a movie. And I was loving films, so I thought, No, I don’t want to try TV. But now I’m loving being on the show more than I ever could have imagined. It has been just the most amazing experience anybody could ever ask for. It’s such a blessing.”
Stanford, clearly, is not in her immediate future—she’s committed to at least six seasons of the series—but Lively says she hasn’t altogether shelved the idea of getting a college education. She claims, in fact, that the possibility of attending Columbia University one day a week was a motivating factor behind accepting the role on the show, which is shot in New York. So far, however, she hasn’t enrolled in any classes, and Gossip Girl executive producers Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage maintain that, while the subject of college did come up during their initial conversations with Lively, the young actress also had less cerebral reasons for wanting to play the über glamorous Serena. “I think the real carrot for Blake was the opportunity for clothing,” Schwartz says, chuckling. “I remember talking to her about that. She was like, ‘Wait, so you’re asking me to move to New York and wear the most incredible clothes, some of which you might actually let me keep?’ So I think the wardrobe-reinvention carrot was stronger than the college-degree carrot.”
He might be on to something. Lively doesn’t even attempt to hide her glee at all the freebies foisted upon her, from designer dresses and diamond bangles to an utterly insane number of pricey purses. “I probably have, like, 60 gorgeous bags,” she says. “I have a closet with my really sharp, fancy, nice ones—the ones that go with my Valentino pumps, for example. And then I have a closet with the ones that are a little more rugged-feeling, the kind that go with my Belstaff motorcycle boots.”
And besides, Lively did recently get to visit Columbia—albeit to shoot an episode of the show. The university (thinly disguised as Yale) was the setting for a brutal smack-down between Serena and Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester), the arch-frenemy with whom she rules the Gossip Girl roost. To prep for the slapfest, Schwartz and Savage had the actresses watch the catfight between Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft in the 1977 film The Turning Point. “That’s what they wanted our fight to be like,” Lively says. “Beating each other with handbags.”
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