Deep terror for Blake Lively filming The Shallows

Blake Lively in The Shallows (Allstar/COLUMBIA PICTURES)

FEW films can have done more for the British tourist industry than Jaws.

After cinema audiences saw the way the great white shark terrorised the pleasure seekers of Amity Island, suddenly a beach holiday somewhere warm didn’t look nearly so appealing.

Now, 40 years on from Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece, Blake Lively is doing her bit for the British staycation with The Shallows.

Set on Australia’s Gold Coast, the taut thriller tells of Nancy, a young pro-surfer who is attacked by an enormous great white shark while practising catching the waves on a secluded beach.

She finds refuge on an isolated rock, just a few hundred yards from the shoreline, but with the shark still prowling and nobody around to help, Nancy must come up with a drastic plan to swim back to safety.

“This film grabs you on a primal level,” says former Gossip Girl star Blake.

“When I read the script, I imagined: ‘What would I do in that situation?’

“The way Nancy fights to survive is pretty incredible.

“She’s a medical student, which comes in handy when she’s bleeding out on a rock in the middle of the ocean.

“But she also likes things a certain way, which is not a great fit when you’ve been thrown into the most-chaotic circumstance you could fathom.

“So you see both the strengthening and disassembling of this woman as she fights to survive.”

The 28-year-old Los Angeles-born actress says she was inspired to take on the challenge presented by the movie after seeing husband Ryan Reynolds in Buried.

A similar single-person movie, it tells of one man’s fight for survival after waking up to find he’s been buried alive and left with just a mobile phone to help negotiate his release.

But while Ryan spent the entire time trapped in a 7ft-long wooden box, Blake’s experience of filming was very different.

For one set up in particular, a wide-angle shot taken from a helicopter to demonstrate Nancy’s distance from the shore, the actress was left entirely on her own for as far as the eye could see, surrounded only by the ocean.

“I’m sitting there, three or four hundred yards from shore, alone, in aggressive, rising tide for the helicopter with the camera to crest over the mountain,” she recalls.

“After a few minutes of pure solitude, the chopper came in, did the shot, and left me alone again.

“There were a good 30 minutes where it was just me, and I really felt the enormity of the situation.

“It was so beautiful, and also so terrifying.”

Adding to Blake’s first-hand knowledge was a conservation trip she undertook to South Africa in 2010 during which she came face-to-face with a great white shark for real — the one in the film being computer generated.

“It was eye opening, as I was always terrified of sharks, but being in the water with them, being within their habitat, they don’t look like big, monstrous creatures — they’re beautiful,” says Blake.

“That was helpful, because in this movie, I’m not thinking of the shark as an attacker — it’s simply trying to survive. As is Nancy.”

The Shallows is at cinemas now.

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