Blake Lively has no problems taking on horrible characters after spending the past decade as one of Hollywood's sweethearts.
The Gossip Girl star feels that men are often considered "charming and sexy" when they play bad guys, while actresses do not come off in the same positive light if they play a bully or a vamp villain - but she still urges her peers to stretch themselves and take on unlikable roles, because women shouldn't need to feel it is important for their characters to be popular.
"I keep getting, 'Here's this great script, it's a male but we will gender flip it'," she tells the Associated Press. "Well why don't we just flip it now...' They've already written (it), but instead of rewriting it, they are like, 'Now this person is a woman', which is great because you want women to be as unlikable as men."
But Blake accepts that some roles need a revamp when a woman signs on to take a part written for a guy: "If you gave a woman Harrison Ford's line, it would be like, 'You can never say that, she's such a jerk', but if it's a man, it's sort of charming and sexy," she adds. "So it's good to have a touch of that, but also there are differences in men and women.
"Let's do a little bit of rewriting (but) I think we need to embrace being unlikable - that is sort of what I've done."
In Blake's new film, A Simple Favor, the actress plays a high-maintenance mean mum with a suitcase full of secrets, who disappears and is presumed dead.
It's a role that was a bit of a stretch for bright and breezy Blake, but she jumped at the chance to be a part of the Paul Feig movie, because the who project reminded her of old Hollywood.
"I don't even know what films I would compare this to, because to me it's not really a thriller and it's not really a comedy, but what I loved about it is that it was like movies like Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, where the plot is very sinister and disturbing and full of twists, but the characters are so over the top and fabulous," she says.
"That happened in Hollywood back in the 1940s, but not so much now and I think it's just time to do it again."
