Serena van der Woodsen is all grown up. Blake Lively got her start on The CW’s Gossip Girl and never looked back.
After starring in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Lively landed the lead in the popular teen drama series, which premiered in 2007.
“There wasn’t a period in my life like Serena went through, where I was doing drugs and having sex with my best friend’s boyfriend. I never went through that kind of crazy,” Lively told Cosmopolitan about her character in 2008, referring to herself as more of a “weird combination” of outgoing and shy.
Lively’s love life first made headlines when she started dating her costar Penn Badgley, who portrayed Serena’s on and off love interest. The twosome called it quits after three years together in 2010.
Following The Town star’s brief fling with Leonardo DiCaprio, Lively started seeing her Green Lantern costar Ryan Reynolds. The couple secretly tied the knot in South Carolina in 2012.
“About a year after Green Lantern had come and gone and we were both single we went on a double date – [Blake] was on a date with another guy and I was on a date with another girl – and it was like the most awkward date for the respective parties because we were just like fireworks coming across,” Reynolds told Entertainment Weekly in 2016. “We were buddies for a long time, which I think is the best way to have a relationship, to start as friends.”
Lively and Reynolds welcomed their first child together, a daughter named James, in 2014. Two years later, the Savages star gave birth to daughter Inez.
“Ryan had a nice, normal upbringing, and we want our kids to have the same normal life that we had,” she told Marie Claire in 2016. “We don’t ever want to rob them of what we had, because we’d feel really selfish.”
The couple will officially be a family of five later this year when Lively, who debuted a baby bump in May, gives birth to their third child.
“Blake has a really great support system,” a source told Us Weekly in August 2019. “She has several mom friends and loves having them over for play dates.”
Scroll through to revisit Lively through the years: