Whether fans are watching Blake Lively portray troubled rich girl Serena on Gossip Girl or listening to her talk about being a mom, the actress is definitely inspiring. She wasn't sure if she should go to college or play Serena, and it's safe to say that this was a big, life-changing choice.

Lively has become super famous after starring in many different kinds of movies, ranging from the thriller A Simple Favor to the heartwarming friendship comedy The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants.

In 2016, Lively starred in a horror movie called The Shallows about a young woman dealing with her mother's death. She goes to a Mexico beach and finds herself stranded in the water and trying to get away from a shark. It's a beautiful and scary movie, so let's learn more about what it was like for Blake Lively to film it.

Water And Sharks

After Gossip Girl went off the air in 2012, Lively has been busy in her personal life and acting career

Blake Lively said it was a "physical movie" and that filming water scenes has challenges.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the star shared that the mornings would be really cold and later on in the day, it would be super hot, so it doesn't sound like it was very comfortable. Lively explained, "When we were in the tank, there were so many chemicals my skin would just fall off. I had all this makeup, like the bruise and the cuts and it would all fall off in the chlorine of the water. Then you’re rubbing against these rocks and these buoys."

Of course, since this is a movie about a woman trying to escape a shark, people wonder how that worked. Lively said, "It was like pink tape x’s that I had to react to. We filmed in the ocean and we also filmed in a tank. They had a big foam one for water displacement. The other thing that they had was they had a guy with a great white sized fin attached and he would swim around on like a little sea doo, like an underwater rocket propeller."

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Life On Set

Lively told Cosmopolitan that because filming took place on an island, there couldn't be a lot of cars, and the cast and crew got to the set via bikes. That turned out to be a challenge, too: she explained that the beach had endangered birds that were similar to black seagulls called Muttonbirds. If someone was on a bike, running them over was a possibility, so they would ride their bikes, then walk to the area where they were filming.

Audiences might have thought that Lively had a stunt double for the movie, but she did a lot of them. There's a scene where her character hurts her nose and that is what really went down in real life. Lively told Entertainment Weekly, "But I did my own stunts until the last two weeks. It’s such a physical movie. There’s a scene where I’m swimming up to the buoy and I crack my face underwater and my nose is pouring blood and that was real. That happened. I wasn’t supposed to crack my face underwater."

Lively's character, Nancy, is a surfer, which made fans wonder if the actress is a pro at that sport. Bustle reported that Lively said in 2010 she had "surfed once before. Since a stunt double stepped in for the final two weeks of shooting, it appears that Lively really was surfing for much of it.

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Food And Workout Routine

When preparing for the movie role, Blake Lively said that she didn't eat soy or gluten. According to People, she said that most products seem to have soy in them, so it was a tricky diet to follow. She said, "Once you remove soy, you realize you’re eating no processed foods. So that’s basically what I did. No processed foods and then working out. [It] seems like, ‘Oh, that’s really easy to cut that out,’ but then you realize, there’s soy in everything. Like, everything you eat, there is soy in it. Even if it’s healthy, Whole Foods-organic stuff, there’s always soy in it."

Don Saladino, who has worked as both Lively and Ryan Reynolds's trainer, told Well + Good that Lively exercised five to six times weekly for the two months leading up to filming The Shallows. Days were split up into upper and lower body, and there was always a rest day included in the process.

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Blake Lively definitely worked hard before and during filming of the movie The Shallows and it totally paid off. The result is a nerve-wracking film with a great story, and it was cool to see the star in this type of role.

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