When it comes to Blake Lively, there’s one secret her friends will always tell: how much of a devoted mom she is.
While the Gossip Girl star and Ryan Reynolds keep their four kids—daughters James, 9, Inez, 7, and Betty, 4, and son Olin, born in 2023—out of the public eye, her close pals and collaborators recently shared insight into her life as a working mom.
“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,” Hugh Jackman said of the couple in the September issue of Vogue, released Aug. 7. “And Blake will be baking and cooking and saying, ‘Let’s make pizza,’ and then the next thing you turn around, and there she is, this incredible star. It’s…it’s astonishing to me.”
Ryan’s longtime pal and Deadpool & Wolverine costar isn’t the only one to notice Blake’s ability to transform from movie star to mom in an instant. In fact, it’s a quality she brought to her latest role in It Ends With Us.
“She could be on a phone call with, it doesn’t matter, the freaking Pope,” author Colleen Hoover, who wrote the novel the film is based on, noted, “and if her kid walks into the room, she’s gonna give one hundred percent of her attention to her children. As a mom, I just really fell in love with that part of her.”
Blake’s A Simple Favor director Paul Feig had the highest praise for the 36-year-old, calling her “one of the best moms I’ve ever seen.”
And Gigi Hadid expressed exactly how much their close bond means to her. “To be friends with her is to have the most beautiful, effortlessly cool, witty, fun, fashionable, creative, caring bonus sister.”
First came Ryan’s Deadpool & Wolverine, which was released in late July and featured Blake in the role of Lady Deadpool. Their daughter Inez voiced the role of Kidpool while toddler Olin was Babypool.
Next Blake’s romance It Ends With Us is coming out on Aug. 9, with the actress even revealing that Ryan helped the project by penning the famous rooftop scene from the book for the film.
“He works on everything I do,” she recently told E! News. “I work on everything he does. So his wins, his celebrations are mine and mine are his. It’s just so thrilling. It’s so surreal in our house right now.”
This Will Make Your Head Spin
“I have seen Frozen with my daughters so, so many times and people don’t know this, but if you play Frozen backwards, it’s actually a shot for shot remake of The Exorcist,” Reynolds joked on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2018.
Fun Uncle
On Dec. 15, 2016, Reynolds and Lively debuted their daughters James and Inez for the first time, at the actor’s Hollywood Walk of Fame Ceremony (a common setting for notoriously private celebrities to introduce the world to their kids). During his speech, Reynolds said to his wife, “You make everything better—absolutely everything in my life better. You’ve given us two of the most incredible children that I could ever hope to have. You’ve made me the father of my dreams when I thought I only had fun uncle potential.”
Best Thing Ever
The Messy Side
“It’s tough when you get pooped on and barfed on, but having a 𝚋𝚊𝚋𝚢 is wonderful,” the proud mama told NW Magazine in 2016. “Even when it’s tough and I’m exhausted, I think, ‘I am so fortunate.'”
A Bullet for Baby
During a visit to the Late Show with David Letterman in 2015, Reynolds gushed about his marriage and his daughter, but made sure viewers knew who was more important. “‘I would take a bullet for you. I could never love anything as much as I love you.’ I would say that to my wife. And the second I looked in that 𝚋𝚊𝚋𝚢’s eyes, I knew in that exact moment that if we were ever under attack, I would use my wife as a human shield to protect that 𝚋𝚊𝚋𝚢.”
