THE HEIST OF THE Heart

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

- BAZ LUHRMANN

“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 worldclass 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.