'The Shallows' Star Blake Lively Admits She's Never Seen 'Jaws'
Blake Lively scored the summer’s first genuinely surprising triumph this weekend with The Shallows, a lean thriller from director Jaume Collet-Serra about a young surfer who finds herself squaring off against a hungry shark. The thriller opened with a better-than-expected $16.7 million at the domestic box office this past weekend. But when it comes to her cinematic great-white predecessors, the 28-year-old actress confesses to being largely in the dark.
In a recent interview with Tim Stack for Entertainment Weekly, Lively admitted that her lifelong fear of sharks has kept her from seeing the single greatest film ever made about the aquatic beasts: Steven Spielberg’s 1976 classic Jaws.
“I was terrified of sharks. I never even watched Jaws because I was so scared of sharks. I went diving with great whites maybe five years ago and that was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had. It was really eye opening. You see these creatures in their habitat, not hunting you. They’re just swimming in the ocean. You get to observe them as they are. There’s such a peacefulness to them and such a beauty to them.”
Related: Meet ‘The Shallows’ Breakout Bird Steven Seagull
Lively said she was partially inspired to make The Shallows by her husband Ryan Reynolds’s 2010 thriller Buried about a man trapped in a buried casket. But she also expressed some surprising sympathy with the undersea predators that she felt the movie captured.
“It was really neat to see them in a humane way rather than see them as monsters. That’s what I connected with this film: Here she came to their territory. You never surf alone. You never go at that hour. She went up on the shark’s feeding ground. You see the shark has a hook in her mouth. You see the shark has been hunted too. It’s really a story of us all trying to survive on this planet.”
Considering that it only cost a reported $17 million to make, The Shallows is already a rousing small-scale win for Sony. And buoyed by solid reviews — it’s currently at 73 percent fresh at Rotten Tomatoes — it should have a lengthy residence throughout July in multiplexes, where you can see it now. Meanwhile, you can read Lively’s entire EW chat here.
Related: ‘The Shallows’ Director on Blake Lively’s Shark Face-Off and Creating That Man-Eating Beast
Watch the ‘Shallows’ trailer:
