No one was expecting Martha Stewart to call Blake Lively’s new career in building a lifestyle brand, Preserve, “stupid,” but the former “Gossip Girl” actress says she’s doing something “totally different.”
In July, the 72-year-old domestic goddess told the Huffington Post, “Let her try. I don’t mean that factiously! I mean, it’s stupid, she could be an actress! Why would you want to be me if you could be an actress?”
On Wednesday, Lively, 26, told E! News that she’s forging her own path professionally, despite critics and naysayers.
“I’m doing something totally different so now I sort of have two careers going on and it’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out. But really what it is, is I have two passions. And I think ultimately, I will always be doing both, but one is going to be paying the bills better than the other.”
“Everything that Preserve is is everything that I grew up around in a big way. My mom is somebody who made everything by hand and anything she didn’t make by hand was a discovery and the discovery was often something that was found in a thrift store that was half broken or falling apart. Or it was something an artisan only made a few of, but we couldn’t afford so we would just go and look at it every day and one day she would just buy it and hide it from my dad,” she continued.
Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, live near Stewart in Connecticut. They’ve developed a close friendship over time and it’s no secret Lively idolizes Stewart. She initially voiced her love for Stewart in Vogue.
“Who doesn’t want to be Martha Stewart?” Lively quipped to E! News. “Martha Stewart has been a huge inspiration to me my entire life. She’s a huge source of inspiration for my mom. She’s how I came to know and love Martha. I always say that Martha Stewart Living is the only magazine I ever had growing up. I never had Tiger Beat or any of that stuff.”