If you were asked a year ago about who played the best game in the business, would you ever have thought that your answer might be Katie Holmes and Blake Lively? Blake Lively has a lot more game than we ever gave her credit for. How did she DO that? Blake Lively didn’t just punk Leonardo DiCaprio and end up in a marriage; what she did, like a proper CEO, was set a long-range goal with a series of achievable short term targets along the way. It’s really quite impressive.
And it’s also impressive how they managed to make this wedding happen with virtually no leaks, buried on a busy weekend in Celebrity as TIFF and Venice and New York Fashion Week were all running concurrently. Not even PEOPLE Magazine? Well, PEOPLE broke the news last night as it was going down, with a question mark at first, and then changed to a confirmation about an hour later. If a deal had already been done for photos and exclusives, I’m not sure that their coverage would have been so tentative out of the gate and given that their report includes very few specific details, nothing about flowers and food and dress, it really does seem like Blake and Ryan wanted to do it privately.
Her?
HER???
Yes. Her. Of course. Because she doesn’t have to anymore, does she?
She got what she wanted. She’s his wife now!
All the moves, all the strategy, all the famewhoring, all of it was in service of yesterday. And yesterday was achieved. This is what I meant about the long range plan.
It started when they worked together on Green Lantern. He was married then. And they were legitimately just friends then. As a friend she invited him to cooking lessons. They made fried green tomatoes together. As a friend she baked some cupcakes on the weekend and packed a few to set for him when they were shooting. As a friend she was appreciative, grateful, not full of the restless, uncompromising energy he was around at home with his wife. As a friend she kept her distance when his marriage fell apart, letting him get off a rebound with Charlize Theron, astutely understanding that he’d have to have at least one of those before he’d be ready to go back into a serious situation. As a friend she went about her European summer of 2011 with Leonardo DiCaprio, capitalising on the benefits of that connection until it was no longer useful to her. Which is when Ryan finally put it together.
Come on. This is a candidate for Gossip MVP, non?
And she gave it everything, you know? She scaled back her professional interests. I’m told she hasn’t been asking to read scripts, she hasn’t been pushing for consideration for parts, she’s really not that interested right now in the work. Which is why the brand sponsorships are working out. It’s good quick money. And it opens up her schedule so that they can have babies. Probably within a year. And then what?
As Duana noted last night, as we’re now beginning to see -- this girl has goals and she’s really good at realising them. She may be content now, but a girl who likes to meet her goals always, eventually, sets new goals, you know? Give it some time, a couple of years or so, and we’ll see if this is still enough.
But Ryan, he’s quite the proposer, isn’t he? He proposed to Alanis, he proposed to Scarlett, he proposed to Blake. You will mostly focus on Blake today, I know. But all of Ryan’s proposing, that’s worth some of your time too.
