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The September issue is here featuring Blake Lively

By Andrew Sean Greer

Directed by Baz Luhrmann

Styled by Tonne Goodman

I have come to meet a movie star, but it’s not a movie star who arrives—it’s a mother of four.

“Sorry about all the kids!” Blake Lively shouts merrily as she staggers under the weight of one child and pulls another along by the hand; a third wanders behind. We are at a terrace restaurant near the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome, and from here we can see the entire city in the slant of evening light, the famous hills and arc of the Tiber river, the marble monuments and ruins tinted pink and blue. Blake’s children are dancing and singing around their mother; it is a scene of joy and silliness and utter chaos, and she seems to be delighting in it.

I tell her I’m not going to mention her kids in this piece, and she says oh you can mention them. “Sitting around with them doing chicken dances while I have a very serious conversation with you is probably the most accurate portrait of me possible. Did you bring cookies?” she asks, noticing the bag in my hand.

I’d hoped to bake with her in the kitchens of the Rome Sustainable Food Project, which had sent along a batch; Blake is known as a world-class baker. “So sorry about that,” she says, brushing her hair out of her face. “I’d love to bake with you! But you can see my life….”

I’m not sure I can see her life, but I can sense it: in the sunny kindness in which she sends her children back to their hotel room, in the glee with which she attacks the cookies, in the almost nerdy enthusiasm she projects for Baz Luhrmann and the shoot they just finished for Vogue.

Here is the wife of Ryan Reynolds, star of Gossip Girl, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, The Age of Adaline, and A Simple Favor—the sequel to which has brought her here to Rome. (She also has a new movie, It Ends With Us, out in August.) Here she is talking about Luhrmann not as a celebrity might but as the teenage girl she used to be, sitting in her bedroom in the San Fernando Valley and looking up at her signed poster from La Bohème.

“I’m just gonna go out on a limb and say Baz is my favorite director,” she states boldly. She is dressed in patched light­-colored jeans and pink-green patterned knits over a white T-shirt, her blond hair floating around her as she gestures. Her face, beautiful in its planes and shadows, faceted by the setting sun, is equally expressive. We have a few hours before Blake needs to head to hair and makeup and then, around midnight, to the Trevi Fountain to film a critical sequence of A Simple Favor 2. “I just love Baz so much. Because he celebrates love. Nobody does love like that.” I ask if that’s why she agreed to this shoot for Vogue. The three jeweled bracelets slip down her arm as she leans her head into her hand. “I’m a very shy person, so I don’t like doing photo shoots, really. Because when I’m acting, I’m playing a character. And I don’t…I don’t feel super comfortable in front of a camera. It’s part of why I don’t want to be in magazines. I know it’s not something I’m supposed to say—I mean, this is I think the first cover I’ve done in four years. Because I just,” she adds, becoming quiet as she goes back to the package of cookies. “I’m just too shy.”

I wonder how someone so effusive could call herself shy.

“My life has become more intimate,” she explains, meaning she has been focused on her young children in recent years, and taking fewer movie roles. “But when they said Baz will do it, I thought, Okay, I’ve always wanted to work with Baz. Even if it’s just a week doing a photo shoot for Vogue, that’s still working with him. Seeing through his lens and how he tells stories.” She smiles, and with a little laugh adds: “Gracing these pages is not my gift to the world. I understand I’m lucky to do it.”

I ask if they came up with the character of the jewel thief together, and she says Luhrmann saw a new side of her in A Simple Favor, something a little dangerous that he liked, that made him think of timelessness and Old Hollywood and To Catch a Thief. “I said, ‘It’s all mischief. Mischief is what I love.’ ” She finishes the cookie and brushes off the crumbs. Her ear jewelry sparkles in the light.

“It was building something around Blake,” Luhrmann will later say of the images on these pages—a story of Lively as “The Cat,” romanced and brought down by the mysterious L’Ombre (played by Hugh Jackman): “A quality in her, wanting to see her play something that you don’t immediately associate with her body of work.”

Lively tells me about going to the Vogue offices for a fitting before the shoot. “It was just supposed to be a fitting, you try on the clothes, there’s a tailor there, they pin the clothes.” She shakes her head, laughing. “There was no pinning of clothes. Because it was Baz and we turned it into a multi-hour photo shoot with hair dryers becoming wind machines and me mounting a desk and people with flashlights creating lighting effects. And later we realized we didn’t take a single fitting photo! Because that’s what he does, sweeps you up into his world,” she says.

Jackman and Lively (in a LaQuan Smith dress and a Cartier necklace) share a scene with (from left) George McNally, Marc Kudisch, Ali Fazal (in a Sabyasachi coat), Paloma Elsesser (in a McQueen by Seán McGirr dress), Simon Jones, Anthony Michael Lopez, Morgan Spector (in a Tanner Fletcher jacket), Dayle Haddon (in a Louis Vuitton jacket, Cartier necklace), and Amanda Murphy.

Luhrmann laughs remembering the scene. “We must have a sense of play,” he says. “I’m not saying actors are children, but if I play—letting go of my fears and my fear of embarrassment—then everyone else has the license to play.”

Blake has come around to my side of the table, “and I had Elizabeth Taylor’s necklace!” she’s telling me. “Elizabeth Taylor’s necklace in my hand. I have to show you. So there were these people there that had these rubber covers on their fingers, and I had a foam mat below me in case the necklace fell….”

As she is showing me pictures on her phone, I’m watching her and wondering: What makes a movie star? There are so few left, at least in the old-fashioned sense of Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn, and here I sit before one of the last of these rare creatures. Breezy and thoughtful and almost geekily enthusiastic, now showing me a video of Luhrmann dancing along as he shows her the moves he wants (“I’ve watched this video so many times”), with pauses where she seems to be wondering, Have I said too much?, before she launches back in with breathless exuberance, talking now about the abundance mindset of Luhrmann and her love of Jackman (“He’s a guy who will show up for you anytime or place. Whether it’s public or private, that man shows up!”), and how can you not be swept up in it? I wonder if that is what makes a star: this drive to create. More even than magnetism and talent and charm, a force of will that directors like Paul Feig and Luhrmann recognize in her. The grit and determination to make something from nothing.

“Are you hungry?” she asks. “Should we order something? I think I’m going to go with fish.” And then we are on to the subject of Halloween costumes….

“They are megawatt stars,” Hugh Jackman tells me over the phone from London, talking about Blake and her husband. “These are like old-school megawatt stars…and of course I’ve spent many hours with them, like in pajamas just hanging out in their house with their nine hundred children and dogs and it is just as normal as can be, and Blake will be baking and cooking and saying, ‘Let’s make pizza,’ and then the next thing you turn around,” he says, describing her changing for an event, “and there she is, this incredible star. It’s…it’s astonishing to me.”

I ask him what he thinks it is, the transformation.

“It’s someone who is comfortable in their own skin,” is how he explains it. “You can’t make that happen. You can’t bestow it on someone. She says she’s shy. And I believe that. I