Blake Lively talks ‘Green Lantern’, Carol Ferris & Star Sapphire
The Wall Street Journal’s ‘Speakeasy’ blog published their interview with “Green Lantern” star Blake Lively yesterday from their session at WonderCon in San Francisco. The star of “The Town” will play Carol Ferris, the love interest of Hal Jordan and later in the comic book mythology, becomes a supervillain – Star Sapphire.
Lively believes her character is non-traditional than Lois Lane or Mary Jane, other iconic female characters in comic books.
“She’s very untraditional in the fact that she is head-to-head with Hal, and the fact that they are always challenging each other was something was really nice – she’s not waiting for him to save her. There are times where he experiences weakness where she has to come in and save him, and I think that that’s a little more like real life. It’s nice to see that in a comic book film when there’s a hero, he’s the hero and he saves the world and he saves the people he loves, but the fact that other people can be heroes too is pretty cool.”
But how does Lively feel about playing the character who becomes a scantily dressed Star Sapphire?
“The way that this movie came to me was that I had made “The Town” with Warner Bros. and they saw footage and they said to me, “We want you to look at ‘Green Lantern’.” I still had to audition for it, but it was really nice for me that this was a studio that wasn’t looking for some girl to have her legs greased up and her boobs out and that’s all that mattered.”
“All I did was screen test with Ryan once and it was more about seeing the chemistry between Hal and Carol and to see if we could spar against each other and have that rivalry and that tension, but also that kindness and care.”
According to Lively, Ferris is a role model of feminism, a strong woman, “a businesswoman; she inherits her father’s aviation company. She’s also militant – she’s a fighter pilot – but she’s also very caring and kind.”
“Also, keeping in mind the fact that she becomes a villain, you have to have those kinds of teeth apparent in the beginning so it makes sense that her arc goes there. So there are a lot of different levels to play with her. But I really appreciated not being the damsel in distress.”
“I really love that Hal wasn’t a super man; he is just a man. He’s somebody who inherits great responsibility, but you’re not really sure he wants it. The fact that he had reservations about being the person responsible for saving planet Earth, the fact that he had weaknesses – his father was taken from him, he was a person with great potential, but was broken and guarded, I loved that, because not everyone is a hero.”
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