Yikes! A bathing suit–clad Blake Lively is forced to fend off a monster of the deep in a preview for her new shark-themed thriller The Shallows.
In the clip, an injured Lively, 28, is stranded on a rock, screaming for help as a gigantic great white ominously circles around her in crystal-clear water.
“What was once in the deep is now in the shallows,” a line reads in the trailer. As you can see in the video, the actress isn’t far from dry land, but swimming back to shore doesn’t look like a safe option.
The Gossip Girl alum plays Nancy, “a young woman who decides to go surfing in an isolated area,” according to Entertainment Weekly.
It turns out the mom of daughter James, 15 months, was well prepared for her latest shark encounter. In 2011, she told Jay Leno that she faced her fears by going cage diving with a school of great whites during a trip to South Africa.
“On the plane, I was hearing these flight attendants talk about shark diving,” she recalled to the then-host of the Tonight Show. “They said, ‘You can go cage diving with great white sharks,’ and I’m terrified of sharks,” Lively said. “So I said, ‘That sounds like a horrible idea – let’s do it!’”
“They throw blood into the water, and they throw fish guts,” Ryan Reynolds’ wife explained at the time. “So you’re standing on a boat and you’re trying to lure in sharks, and then you see great white sharks circling your boat – and that’s a good thing. Everything you never want to happen is happening.”
While she described the experience as “terrifying,” Lively is glad she mustered up the courage.
“It was scary, but it was also a really beautiful thing, because you realize when you look at your fears in the eyes, they didn’t want to bite me,” she said. “They’re just as afraid of us as we are of them.”
Watch the sneak peek above. The Shallows hits theaters June 24.
