Many people consider Blake Lively one of the luckiest women in the world. She’s a major film star in her own right, and as a bonus, she’s married to Ryan Reynolds. Rich, famous, and married to a handsome superstar…in that sense, she has it all. But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t faced some difficulties, most of which were completely her fault.
As a celebrity superstar, Lively is constantly in front of the camera. Normally, she’s promoting movies or popping up at major events. Unfortunately, everything from her baffling fashion choices to her offensive language has caused drama that will likely follow her around for the rest of her life.
What kind of drama are we talking about? Keep reading to discover Blake Lively’s most shocking media moments!
Blake Lively dropped a slur in an interview
Normally, celebrities are trained to be very cautious about their language. After all, it only takes a single careless word to create countless headlines and turn the biggest fans into major haters. However, Blake Lively apparently didn’t get that memo because she dropped a slur during an interview with Nylon TV.
She was being interviewed alongside her Gossip Girl costar Leighton Meester, someone with whom she was rumored to be feuding with. Lively wanted to kill those rumors but dropped a slur while doing so. “You read the gossip magazines, everybody [in the cast] is dating everyone, everybody hates everyone, everybody has had like tons of plastic surgery and they’re actually men and tr***ies,” she said, using a slur for transgender folks. “It’s just like you don’t listen to the rumors.”
This would have been bad enough as a one-off incident. Wildly enough, she used the slur two more times around the same time in other interviews. She’s never acknowledged this, but the scandal continues to follow her year after year.
The wedding venue that nearly destroyed her reputation
As mentioned before, Blake Lively is married to Ryan Reynolds. They’re a major power couple and seem really crazy for one another. It’s great that they are so in love, but the day they tied the knot created a major controversy that looks like it may never fully go away. And it all has to do with their choice of a wedding venue…specifically, Boone Hall Plantation in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
The venue was almost certainly chosen because of how beautiful it is. However, critics of the couple were less concerned with the venue’s aesthetics and more concerned with its problematic history. This was previously a slave plantation, and getting hitched there instantly caused a PR flap for the happy couple. In particular, Lively got a devastatingly unflattering nickname: “plantation princess.”
Later, Reynolds would acknowledge that the wedding venue was a mistake and that they had simply picked a pretty location off of Pinterest without realizing its awful history. His apology seemed genuine, but it wasn’t enough to silence his harshest critics.
The Superbowl fashion fail
One of Blake Lively’s most recent shocking media moments was less explosive than earlier incidents involving slurs and slave plantations. When she attended the 2024 Superbowl, she made a fashion faux pas, but it’s one the internet had a field day with. Going for comfort over style, the movie star attended the event wearing a red Adidas tracksuit and a white crop top.
Honestly, it’s not the ugliest outfit, but it didn’t help that Lively attended the event with Taylor Swift, currently the world’s hottest musician. Swift went with a black, casual outfit that managed to look both understated and elegant. By comparison, poor Blake Lively looked like a college kid recovering from a hangover who just grabbed random clothes out of the closet while running late to class!
Getting downright mean in an interview
It’s really hard to top that interview where Blake Lively randomly dropped a slur. But her 2016 interview with Kjersti Flaa is an all-timer when it comes to awkwardness. Lively was ostensibly there to promote her new movie Cafe Society, but the interview almost immediately went off the rails and never recovered.
Lively was early into her first pregnancy at the time, and this was public knowledge, so Flaa casually mentioned “Congrats on your little bump.” Apparently taking this as some kind of slight against her appearance, Lively sarcastically said the same thing to her interviewer. Just one problem: not only was Flaa not pregnant, but she was unable to ever get pregnant. She later admitted that Lively’s mean joke “left me almost paralyzed…that comment was like a bullet.”
The rest of the interview wasn’t much better, with Lively doing her best to ignore the reporter and instead mostly speaking to her costar, Parker Posey. And both of them seemed to get downright mad at even the simplest questions about the film, including their character’s wardrobe. Flaa was later quite blunt about how the interview made her feel: “I felt belittled and ignored, and it made me question if I ever wanted to do these types of interviews again.”