You would think that Blake Lively would have watched Jaws in preparation for her role in this summer's shark attack thriller, The Shallows. After all, Steven Spielberg's classic shark attack thriller is the end all / know all of its niche genre. Surprisingly though, Ms. Lively has never seen Jaws, and for one very personal fact: up until a couple of years ago, she was still deathly afraid of the creatures.
It's a revelation that comes from a rather insightful interview between Blake Lively and the folks at Entertainment Weekly, which is timely considering The Shallows' rather low-key release into theaters last weekend. Lively's full confession was more in depth about how she overcame her fears, as she stated:
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.
Blake Lively would then go on to talk about how the beast she faces in The Shallows isn't as much of a villain as the ads may paint it to be. As a matter of fact, Lively drops the detail that we see a shark hook in the shark's mouth, indicating that it too was a prey to an unsuspecting hunter. Throw in some climate change logic as to why the shark is patrolling the shallow water in the first place, and you've got a protagonist who has more in common with their hunter than they normally would.
The same cannot be said about the shark in Steven Spielberg's Jaws, as that shark was portrayed as nothing more than a killing machine with a mean streak a mile wide. Though, to be fair, that film was made in a different era of scientific consciousness, while also playing its part as a blockbuster that sparked the modern craze of event films. To compare the world that Jaws was released into, versus the world that The Shallows was created for, is something that could be debated for ages.
However, what's not up for debate is the fact that Blake Lively owes it to herself to sit down and watch Jaws, now that she's over her fear of sharks and has made her own picture fending one off. With the possibility of The Shallows 2 being floated about, it'd be good practice for Lively to not only see where that film went right, but also how its subsequent sequels went wrong. After all, one franchise of lackluster shark movies is enough.
The Shallows is in theaters now, waiting in the spot you'd least expect it to be in.
