Happy wife, happy life -- and ping-pong table present, fun filming.
Blake Lively proved the latter to be true when she sent over an actual ping-pong table to the movie studio where her famous husband, Ryan Reynolds, was shooting Deadpool & Wolverine with Hugh Jackman. As the actors and director Shawn Levy recall in a new interview with Vanity Fair, the fellow actor and mom of four drew some inspiration from Hollywood's history of ping-pong playing on set for her other half's project.
"Speaking of Blake, that's the real reason these ping-pong photos came about. She and I have a bunch of these prints of actors playing it on their sets," Reynolds explains. "We've got Newman and Redford in Durango, Mexico, during the shooting of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. We've got Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda, I think in the '30s. We have Olivia de Havilland playing ping-pong, Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman playing. Joan Crawford. So Blake sent the ping-pong table to Pinewood Studios."
While Reynolds and Jackman are longtime friends and Levy has worked with both performers on previous films, it seems the ping-pong table offered the trio something else to bond over.
"The three of us together are like the Three Amigos," Jackman says. "There was not a day where I wasn't in tears laughing. I felt so rejuvenated playing the part. I mean, I'm 25 years in, man, and it feels better than ever."
Adds Levy, "It's why those ping-pong photos are our personal favorites. For the three of us, those photos are treasures. They captured the spirit of this shoot. It was very hard work, but it was fun every day because we were doing it with buddies."
Meanwhile, amid her own highly anticipated summer movie, It Ends With Us, Lively does not hide her admiration for one of her celebrity buddies, Taylor Swift, declaring herself the singer's biggest fan.
"No, no, I really am," she reiterated to ET during an interview at Book Bonanza in Texas.
Thanks to a very handy connection to the megawatt star, Lively helped secure Swift's 2020 track, "my tears ricochet," for the trailer promoting the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover's hit romance novel.
"You could've put any song on, like, her music is just, like, unmatched," she gushed of Swift's discography. "Her writing is so beautiful and it's so personal and you can feel that, you can feel that in the way that she sings. You can feel that in her lyrics."
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