Blake Lively

Gossip Girl needed a Serena, and the 19-year-old who got the part had the look for it. The show ran from 2007 to 2012 and turned Lively into the face of a franchise that had its cast on every magazine cover and built a whole aspirational-rich-girl aesthetic around her. She'd appeared in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants in 2005, but that was before the show made her into something more specific: the TV girlfriend everyone wanted to be and nobody could quite mark as a villain even when she was acting like one.

The It Ends With Us situation is the defining story of her current public image. She filed a sexual harassment complaint against director Justin Baldoni in late 2024, alleging he hired a PR firm to run a coordinated digital smear campaign against her after she complained about his behavior on set. Baldoni countersued for $400 million, which a federal judge dismissed. A court-ordered settlement conference in February 2026 fell apart, with trial set for May 2026. Her non-alcoholic mixer brand Betty Buzz reportedly moved 2.5 million bottles in its first seven months without a marketing budget, which makes her business operation a lot harder to dismiss than her film career makes it seem.

She doesn't drink alcohol, doesn't eat gluten or soy, and still started a beverage company (the brand logic isn't hard to follow). Betty Buzz takes its name from her late father Ernie Lively's mother and sister, both of whom were named Betty, which is a better backstory than most celebrity brands get. She named her first dog 405, after the freeway where she found him wandering. Her father was a working actor, her mother a talent scout, and all four of her older siblings are actors. The family background explains the career path. It doesn't explain the scale.