Despite having her own hit movie basically simultaneously as her husband Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively is having a bit of an unlucky week. Reports of a feud between her and her co-star/director Justin Baldoni have only been bouncing around the internet, and on top of that, she has been criticized for how she’s handled the marketing around her movie, which features a heavy domestic violence storyline, a fact that many people seem unaware of.
As with many rumors, this caused internet sleuths to re-examine Lively’s past interviews and press cycles, which has unearthed some controversial moments from the former Gossip Girl actress.
While promoting her 2016 film Cafe Society (directed by Woody Allen), Lively and Parker Posey were doing rounds when Norwegian reporter Kjersti Flaa congratulated her on her “little bump.” Lively was pregnant with her second child at the time, and she quickly responded to the interviewer, “Congrats on your little bump!” which was met with an awkward laugh.
This week, Flaa uploaded the video to her YouTube channel with the title “The Blake Lively interview that made me want to quit my job,” which now has over a million views, not counting the rounds it made on Twitter and TikTok. Flaa told The Daily Mail that the comment was “traumatizing” and made her rethink her career. “To be honest, it hurts because I obviously wasn’t pregnant and I could never get pregnant. So to me that comment was like a bullet,” Flaa explained. For a lot of the interview, Lively and Posey continue to talk to each other instead of addressing the interviewer. Fans online have argued that Flaa shouldn’t have commented on the pregnancy at all.
Flaa said that she had been asked to do the interview for her job, and the ordeal made her feel like a “complete failure.” She added, “It was such a traumatizing experience to me. I was there to do a job, and they made sure to make it as difficult as possible for me to do that. I was invited to meet them. It certainly did not feel like that. I felt belittled and ignored, and it made me question if I ever wanted to do these types of interviews again.”
Flaa has since gone on to interview the likes of Robert De Niro and Morgan Freeman, so it’s a good thing she kept her job.