Blake Lively began shooting her latest movie, The Shallows, just ten months after giving birth to her daughter James. The physically strenuous film would be an epic challenge for anyone, let alone someone who'd just gone through the experience of giving birth. The 28-year-old began working with trainer Don Saladino to prepare for shooting the film, but according to Lively, the most rigorous workouts began when she reached the set.
Saladino made a point of ensuring that Lively's workout routine was accessible and healthy, featuring go-to moves like squats. "I have my clients do body weight squats for two minutes straight each day. They work your core, lower back, hips, legs—even ankles," Saladino tells SELF. "He just kicked my butt in the best way, in the most healthy way," Lively told Entertainment Tonight of Saladino. However, since Lively's role in the film involved lots of physical activity—she plays a stranded surfer trying to outlive a bloodthirsty great white shark—nearly every day of shooting was exercise in itself. "I was working out 13 hours a day because shooting was working out," she told Entertainment Tonight. Dang! "Being in waves like that, swimming like that, doing such long takes like that all the time—I became so much stronger and more fit by the end of production." Lively shared that filming The Shal**lows got her in "better shape than I had ever been in before."
She also credited her husband, the babealicious Ryan Reynolds, for supporting her in taking on such a physical challenge. Reynolds knows a thing or two about athletic effort on set. His 2010 film Buried took him to new physical heights as he took on the role of a truck driver who was buried alive in Iraq, and he encouraged Lively to take on a similar challenge. "He always talked about Buried and what an important thing that was for him to be able to do. What a challenge it was and boy, was it a payoff." Lively told Entertainment Tonight. She also shared that after reading the script for The Shallows, Reynolds told Lively, "'Be prepared, this movie is a physical challenge, it is an athletic event.'"
Lively's body also faced other challenges during shooting—like an almost-broken nose. "There's a scene in the movie where I'm under [a rusty metal] buoy and I pull up and I crack my nose on the buoy and I have this bloody nose," she told Entertainment Tonight. "That was not a part of the movie—that something that happened while shooting!..Luckily, we ended up with a cool scene." What a trooper. Something Lively especially loves about the movie is that it gives her a chance to take on the type of gritty, badass role that isn't often offered to women. "It's something that you see for the boys a lot," she shared with ET. "But to get to be a lady that goes toe-to-toe with an apex predator and she gets to be an apex predator herself, I mean that's cool." Preach!
UPDATE 6/30/16: This piece has been updated to include a quote from Don Saladino.
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Photo Credit: ESBP / Star Max / Getty / Columbia Pictures
