In 'The Age of Adaline', Blake Lively plays a young mother who remains permanently 29 after an accident, watching her daughter grow up and become a grandmother herself. This is Lively's first film in three years, after taking a break to marry Ryan Reynolds and give birth to their daughter James, now 4 months old.

Blake Lively in 'The Age of Adaline'Blake Lively in 'The Age of Adaline'

"After I wrapped 'Gossip Girl' I took about a year off because I was just tired." she says. "We worked 10 months a year, 16 to 18 hours a day. So I just wanted a break. I read a bunch of scripts and there were a few movies that I liked, but this is the first one that I thought, 'I can't not do this movie.' So I talked my way into it!"

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Lively was in the early stages of pregnancy when she filmed 'The Age of Adaline'. "I was kind of nauseous," she says, "so it impacted my thoughts like, 'Dear God, I can't believe I have to do this stunt today!' That was tough."

But she enjoyed making this character a real person and dressing up for the different eras ("The '60s were the opposite of everything else!"), and the thing she loved most was telling such an unusual story.

Watch the trailer for 'The Age of Adaline' here:

"I feel like magic doesn't exist much in films these days, unless it's a superhero movie. Or if it has wands," she adds. "But magic in a quiet film is very rare. This is the sort of movie that can reach a broader audience, and yet it has magic and humanity. Everybody said, 'Wouldn't it be amazing to alive for 100 years,' but you look at everything that's happened in the world in the past 100 years and it would be really painful to see what humanity does to itself. To live through that would give you survivor's syndrome! Adaline's also not only surviving the first love of her life, her husband, but now she's about to survive her daughter."

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Thankfully, playing Adaline wasn't all heavy going. "I would joke on set, because people would ask if I was trying to portray a woman from the 1920s or 1960s," Lively says. "And I would say, 'I'm just trying to pretend that I'm an old cat lady!' She's an old woman, and I'm sure she would have gone a little bit crazy."