This Blake Lively Character Prepared the Actress to Play Emily in A Simple Favor

When trailers first started circulating for Paul Feig’s 2018 thriller/comedy, A Simple Favor, fans of a different, since-concluded Blake Lively project could be seen tilting their heads all over the world. What was this movie, they wondered, in which their beloved Lively is playing someone who reminds them so distinctly of Gossip Girl‘s Serena van der Woodsen?

In A Simple Favor — a surprise hit when it hit the big screen six years ago, making the decision for its sequel to skip theaters that much more baffling — Lively stars as Emily Nelson, a PR director for a fashion company who constantly dresses to the nines, has a beautiful home and a handsome husband, yet is as mysterious as they come. Her new friend, Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick), has a vlog that focuses on crafts and recipes for parents. The two, despite being an unlikely pairing, become fast friends. Might this sound like Dan and Serena to anyone else?

How Similar Are Emily Nelson And Serena van der Woodsen?

The simplest connection between Emily and Serena is probably the easiest thing to see, that being their sense of style, a shared fashion sense that can only be afforded by the wealthiest and most elite New York residents. (Oh, that, too: Both characters reside in New York, with Serena in the Big Apple and Emily in the suburbs, which she despises.) Emily tends to dress like she’s about to audition for a classy cabaret gig in Las Vegas. She’s big on suit jackets and Louboutin pants, the likes of which most finance executives wouldn’t dream of dropping thousands on. Both characters are likely to be found perpetually sipping dry martinis in glasses that never seem to run empty.

But there are deeper connections between the two, those that might require a psychoanalyst to truly understand. Both A Simple Favor‘s Emily and Gossip Girl‘s Serena pose and behave like the kind of girl that everyone wants to be. They have everything anyone could ever want — the house and/or apartment, the clothes, the bags, the cars, and the looks. They exude an impenetrable confidence that even the coldest souls cannot break through. Yet on the inside, both Emily and Serena are seriously complicated people, women with deep-seated insecurities that cloak their souls like their own personal storm clouds that follow them around, day to day.

Emily, for instance, isn’t even the real name of Lively’s character in A Simple Favor. In fact, her true identity is Hope McLendon, a girl who was born into an abusive family, with a cruel mother and a father who would beat the girls repeatedly. Per the character’s backstory, Hope and Faith, her twin sister who is also played by Lively in the film, turned 16, they set their family’s house on fire, an act that killed their father and, thanks to some forging efforts, killed them, too. It allowed them to start new lives, a lease with which Hope elected to reinvent herself as “Emily Nelson,” a new woman who just so happens to have mysterious, near-sociopathic tendencies. All is fair in making a genre-defining mystery movie, yes?

Serena van der Woodsen isn’t quite the murderous type, nor has she changed her identity — yet — but she is certainly far more complicated than she presents herself as being. Her nickname, the ‘It girl of the Upper East Side,’ fits her well, but she doesn’t quite feel like the socialite-slash-heiress that she is in title. Thanks to her family’s riches, Serena essentially has it all, but she never seems to match the expectations those have of her, as her party-girl reputation and the dark secrets hidden within her family’s history tend to cloud her ability to succeed in academics and extracurriculars.

Both Serena and Emily Have Disappearing Streaks

In the Season 6 premiere of Gossip Girl, called “Gone Maybe Gone,” Serena dramatically leaves New York after being rejected by her best friend, Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) and her on-and-off love interest, Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley). Though she returns eventually, the startling nature of her disappearance sends ripples through her community, with her friends and family fearing the worst. The same goes for A Simple Favor‘s Emily, who vanishes without a trace after agreeing to pick up Stephanie’s son from school. When “she” turns up dead later in the film, much drama has unfolded, including Stephanie and Emily’s husband, Sean (Henry Golding), having slept together, and Sean having taken out a $4 million life insurance policy in the event that Emily died after disappearing.

Where Serena and Emily tend to cross over the most is in the fact that Emily appears to be one of Serena’s own creations, a new personality she decides to take on in hopes of reinventing herself once again. Serena spends much of Gossip Girl‘s six-season run ravaged by personal demons; there’s no telling how the confidence and allure that Emily possesses might have aided her in the darkest times, even if it was through self-manipulation.

Needless to say, the events of both A Simple Favor and Gossip Girl are complicated beyond recognition, not to mention over-dramatic for the sake of wild storytelling. But that’s what makes both projects so beloved, especially by their cult-like fanbases. Perhaps it’s no coincidence, then, that Blake Lively’s most iconic character informed a later icon of her making. Call it a simple favor from one Lively to another.