(Photo: Patrick McMullan)

It looks like celebrity stalking by celebrities, but Robin Wright Penn and Blake Lively appearing in the same two movies this fall (The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and New York, I Love You) is entirely coincidental. In fact, they don’t appear together in either film, but do very much inform each other’s performances in Pippa Lee. As the younger Pippa—a wild, sweet mess of a girl—Lively proves to be that rarity, an actress who pops on screens big and small, though her work on Gossip Girl was news to Rebecca Miller. “I thought I was casting an unknown. I’m a little out of the loop,” says the director, who lives in Ireland with husband Daniel Day-Lewis. “Then every magazine I pick up has her on the cover!”

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• Archive: “Guides”
• Articles by Mary Kaye Schilling
• Table of Contents: Aug 31, 2009 issue of New York | Subscribe!