28-year-old Blake Lively appears in almost every frame of The Shallows, which depicts a woman stranded in the ocean while a shark tries to attack her. As husband Ryan Reynolds took on a similar project with 2010’s Buried, he warned her about getting emotionally exhausted.
According to Lively, her husband told her: “This is going to be an athletic event. Prepare yourself. It will beat you up emotionally, it will be rewarding. It will be the most physical thing you’ve ever done in your life. Don’t be thrown by that.”
Although she survived the grueling role of The Shallows and is now pregnant with her second child, the actress admits she wasn’t really impressed by the idea of Reynolds’s movie Buried, where the he remained trapped in a box.
She recalled: “I remember when I first saw that movie. I thought, ‘I really like you, you’re a cool person but I don’t think I want to watch anyone in a box for an hour-and-a-half.’ But it was beautiful film-making.”
Regarding her recent film, she told Marie Claire: “You don’t even hear your director most of the time because there are waves you can’t hear over. So we would sometimes do 16-minute takes, as long as we could, just letting your imagination take you wherever it could go.”
The theme of The Shallows was compared to The Revenant, which had won Leonardo DiCaprio an Oscar. She added: “That’s a very generous comparison. It’s an isolation movie where, for better or worse, you have to hold the screen for 99 percent of the movie. You’re trying to make it a fun, sexy, cool summer movie. You don’t have the pressure of trying to win your Oscar.”