Blake Lively pressured a journalist into drinking her husband Ryan Reynolds‘s gin on camera in a toe-curling interview that has resurfaced amid her legal showdown with Justin Baldoni.
Magnus Sundholm, an LA-based writer for Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, told DailyMail.com the incident was ‘sneaky, cheap and disrespectful’ of Lively.
He sat down with the actress at 10am in August 2018 for a short interview about her movie A Simple Favor, which was being released the following month.
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More spills: Magnus Sundholm has revealed that Blake Lively made him drink her husband’s gin brand during an interview
But he was left shocked and uncomfortable when Lively whipped out a bottle of Reynolds’s Aviation Gin and urged him to knock back shots during a 10am interview in 2018.
The deeply awkward exchange, which Sundholm reposted on YouTube last year, is just one of several videos of Lively that have made her followers ‘cringe’ in recent months.
These include ‘tone deaf’ name-drops of her own liquor company during promotions of her movie about domestic violence, and snapping at another reporter, Kjersti Flaa, when she congratulated Lively on her pregnancy.
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Cheers and fears: The journalist said Lively made him drink shots, despite it being 10am
Sundholm said that Lively ‘hijacked’ their four minutes together, under the thin pretext of mistaking his request for a camera ‘shot’ instead referring to alcohol.
‘Magnus, when I saw you earlier you said “let me get a shot”, and I thought you meant of alcohol, but you meant a photograph,’ Lively said in the video, while flashing a bottle of Aviation Gin to the camera.
‘So guess what? Time to put up.’
‘Uh oh,’ said Magnus. ‘What are we drinking?’
‘Aviation American Gin, who’s owned by a very, very sexy man, who also happens to be my husband.’
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Awks moment: Sundholm’s interview with Lively was for the movie A Simple Favor and was limited to four minutes
Sundholm, with an uncomfortable grimace, replied: ‘So, we’re starting early.’
‘We are starting early,’ Lively said, looking at him dead on. ‘What better time to start.’
He took a sip and told her it was ‘good’.
She then cajoled him: ‘Just shoot it, just shoot it.’
He tried to politely refuse, saying: ‘I’ll be singing if I finish this.’
Unrelenting, Lively said: ‘It’ll be so much more interesting.’
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Power couple: Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds is the owner of booze brand Aviation Gin
Sundholm told DailyMail.com that the interview in New York felt ‘like an ambush – a carefully planned PR ambush.
‘She used my short interview time for blatant product placement. I found it sneaky, cheap and disrespectful.’
In September 12 last year, Sundholm’s girlfriend, Norwegian journalist Kjersti Flaa, posted a video on YouTube where she asked him about ‘his cringe interview with Blake Lively’.
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Ambushed: Sundholm said Lively ‘hijacked’ their brief time together to product place her husband’s alcohol company
‘You looked very uncomfortable there. You looked like you were suffering a little bit, and didn’t know what to do,’ she said.
‘It was early in the morning. It was kind of surreal in a way,’ Sundholm told her.
‘I was there to interview her. They’d built a set. And I was completely ambushed by her promoting her husband’s gin.
‘Most countries in the world, you can’t show that. You can’t have a booze commercial in what’s supposed to be regular content.
‘She hijacked the interview, in a sense. She took almost half of that interview to talk about product placement, basically.’
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Booze schmooze: Lively onstage with a bottle of Aviation Gin alongside co-stars Paul Feig and Anna Kendrick as they promote A Simple Favor
He added: ‘I drank gin at 10am. I kind of felt like I had to. You come up there after having had your cereal and milk, and then all of a sudden you get gin served on the rocks.
‘I’m not saying I’m a victim. I could have said no. But the whole setup was weird.
‘It was a blatant promotional thing. I played along. I could, of course, have objected. But my job is to make the talent play along. I want to be friendly, I want her to open up.’
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Media couple: The clip of Sundholm and Lively was posted by his girlfriend, journalist Kjersti Flaa, who has had her own run-in with Lively
Sundholm told DailyMail.com that the incident was all the more awkward given Lively is teetotal, or abstains from drinking alcohol.
‘I thought the whole thing was strange. I still wonder why someone who doesn’t drink would push alcohol on someone else.
‘You walk out of there thinking, what the – just happened,’ he said.
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Clashing couple: Reynolds and Lively are embroiled in a bitter legal feud with Justin Baldoni
Sundholm added that Lively played the same trick on the other journalists lined up to interview her during the A Simple Favor movie promotion.
‘Everyone came out after me and said “she wanted me to drink, she was pushing the gin,”‘ he said.
Flaa said she believed it was ‘unethical’ to push alcohol on someone without knowing their history with booze – especially as Lively is sober herself.
‘I think it’s really unethical to do that. Maybe you had alcohol issues,’ she said.
2018: Blake Lively pressures journalist to drink Ryan Reynolds’ gin
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