Blake Lively’s Inner Circle Shares Rare Insight on Her Life as a Mom to 4 Kids

When it comes to Blake Lively, there’s one secret her friends will always tell: how much of a devoted mom she is.

While the Gossip Girl star and Ryan Reynolds keep their four kids—daughters James, 9, Inez, 7, and Betty, 4, and son Olin, born in 2023—out of the public eye, her close pals and collaborators recently shared insight into her life as a working mom.

“I’ve spent many hours with them, like in pajamas just hanging out in their house with their nine hundred children and dogs and it is just as normal as can be,” Hugh Jackman said of the couple in the September issue of Vogue, released Aug. 7. “And Blake will be baking and cooking and saying, ‘Let’s make pizza,’ and then the next thing you turn around, and there she is, this incredible star. It’s…it’s astonishing to me.”

Ryan’s longtime pal and Deadpool & Wolverine costar isn’t the only one to notice Blake’s ability to transform from movie star to mom in an instant. In fact, it’s a quality she brought to her latest role in It Ends With Us.

“She could be on a phone call with, it doesn’t matter, the freaking Pope,” author Colleen Hoover, who wrote the novel the film is based on, noted, “and if her kid walks into the room, she’s gonna give one hundred percent of her attention to her children. As a mom, I just really fell in love with that part of her.”

Blake’s A Simple Favor director Paul Feig had the highest praise for the 36-year-old, calling her “one of the best moms I’ve ever seen.”

And Gigi Hadid expressed exactly how much their close bond means to her. “To be friends with her is to have the most beautiful, effortlessly cool, witty, fun, fashionable, creative, caring bonus sister.”

It's an exciting time for the Lively-Reynolds home as both Blake and Ryan have highly anticipated box office releases coming out within weeks of each other. 

First came Ryan's Deadpool & Wolverine, which was released in late July and featured Blake in the role of Lady Deadpool. Their daughter Inez voiced the role of Kidpool while toddler Olin was Babypool. 

Next Blake's romance It Ends With Us is coming out on Aug. 9, with the actress even revealing that Ryan helped the project by penning the famous rooftop scene from the book for the film. 

"He works on everything I do," she recently told E! News. "I work on everything he does. So his wins, his celebrations are mine and mine are his. It's just so thrilling. It's so surreal in our house right now."

While Blake and Ryan don't often bring their kids in public, the spouses often talk about their ever-growing brood. Read on for what they've said about parenthood. 

"I have seen Frozen with my daughters so, so many times and people don't know this, but if you play Frozen backwards, it's actually a shot for shot remake of The Exorcist," Reynolds joked on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2018.

On Dec. 15, 2016, Reynolds and Lively debuted their daughters James and Inez for the first time, at the actor's Hollywood Walk of Fame Ceremony (a common setting for notoriously private celebrities to introduce the world to their kids). During his speech, Reynolds said to his wife, "You make everything better—absolutely everything in my life better. You've given us two of the most incredible children that I could ever hope to have. You've made me the father of my dreams when I thought I only had fun uncle potential."

In August 2016, before the birth of the couple's second daughter, Reynolds told E! News, "There's nothing on earth more grounding than having a baby. It's the best thing that could ever happen to someone."

"It's tough when you get pooped on and barfed on, but having a baby is wonderful," the proud mama told NW Magazine in 2016. "Even when it's tough and I'm exhausted, I think, 'I am so fortunate.'"

During a visit to the Late Show with David Letterman in 2015, Reynolds gushed about his marriage and his daughter, but made sure viewers knew who was more important. "'I would take a bullet for you. I could never love anything as much as I love you.' I would say that to my wife. And the second I looked in that baby's eyes, I knew in that exact moment that if we were ever under attack, I would use my wife as a human shield to protect that baby."

In tradition with his dark sense of humor, Reynolds shared this little parenting joke with his Twitter followers in 2016: "Being a father is the single greatest feeling on earth. Not including those wonderful years I spent without a child, of course."

"I always do the dirty work," Reynolds said on NBC's Today show in 2016. "I'm happy to do the dirty work. So does she, but I'm always, I love getting up in the middle of the night, I'm fine with that, you know, all that stuff."

Fatherhood, he said, has been "amazing."

"I had one of those mornings, rare mornings, where my daughter just didn't want me to leave—and it was only because my wife was asleep," Reynolds said in 2016. "But it was like, you didn't want to go. You just like, it kills you."

"You know, what was really weird was, we were watching the Super Bowl and my daughter saw it and she totally recognized me. There was like 12 of me, which is just like, to her, was like 24 useless boobs," Reynolds said in 2016. "She was so not impressed. She was like, 'Eh, whatever.'"

"Damn it's hard letting your infant daughter go somewhere alone for the first time, I was a total mess dropping her off at Burning Man," Ryan joked to his Twitter followers in 2016.

"She's great, man. She's great," the proud papa gushed in 2015 before revealing whether the couple's then-only child James has started speaking. "We're getting a lot of sounds, nothing that sounds like discernible English at this point," he quipped, adding, "I'm mocking her a lot."

"@vancityreynolds Since the day our baby was born, I've felt so strongly in my heart that you were most likely the father," Lively wrote on Instagram in 2015. "#ILoveYouSoMuchItsSilly."

"Having a baby is just living in the constant unexpected," Lively said in 2016. "You never know when you're gonna get crapped on or when you're gonna get a big smile or when that smile immediately turns into hysterics. It might be like living with a drug addict. But you have a baby and you think, 'I can't imagine ever not having a baby,' because they grow up so quickly. I'd be an 80-year-old woman with a baby if I could."

 "It's the best," Lively said in 2015. "It's the thing that binds us all—family. We have very unique jobs for a living, but we all are a part of someone's family. It's a nice thing."

"On Father's Day, my daughter smiled at me," Reynolds tweeted in 2015. "It was all the gift I needed as I packed a bag and left for 6 years to write a book on parenting."

"There have been times where I woke up, literally had no idea I had been walking for five minutes," he told E! News while promoting his movie Woman in Gold in 2015.

"But you love it. You wake up in the middle of the night, you got a big stupid smile on your face. I was telling someone else that. Anything else that woke you up every 45 minutes, you'd kill it. But when it's a baby, it's the best thing that ever happened to you."

"One of the most common things in the world is making out, having a couple of drinks, and then doing it, and then having a baby. I was perfectly sober for this one though. I gotta say," Reynolds joked in 2016.

"It's amazing. I just always marvel how common it is and yet how profound it is. And I always laugh because you know celebrities you always cringe when they talk about their kids. Like 'my child is the only one that has ever exited a womb out, ever.'"

"Well, a lot of people have done this, so you always want to temper it with a little of self-effacement. But I love it," Reynolds said in 2015 about then-only child James. "I truly worship that kid. It's terrible. She has me so far wrapped around her finger it's dumb. She says 'Dada' and I will walk through a cement wall to get to her."