Blake Lively Weighs in on Martha Stewart's Comments About Her New Website Preserve

Exclusive! Find out what the actress has to say about her idol

Blake Lively loves Martha Stewart. The two have actually become friends.

But Stewart did make headlines last week when she weighed in on Lively's new Preserve website.

"I mean, it's stupid, she could be an actress!" Stewart told the Huffington Post. "Why would you want to be me if you could be an actress. I just did a movie yesterday, though—I can't even tell you about it—but I want to be Blake Lively."

Lively believes she can be both an actress and a lifestyle entrepreneur.

"I want to have my own path professionally and even as she said, I'm an actress," Lively told me earlier today. "I'm doing something totally different so now I sort of have two careers going on and it'll be interesting to see how it all pans out. But really what it is, is I have two passions. And I think ultimately, I will always be doing both, but one is going to be paying the bills better than the other."

Preserve is part magazine with articles, recipes and fashion spreads and part e-commerce with a Lively-curated collection of products for sale, including bow ties, sterling silver jewelry, jars of vegan hot fudge, porcelain vases, California-shaped cutting boards and more.

"It was a very natural transition for me," Lively said. "Everything that Preserve is is everything that I grew up around in a big way. My mom is somebody who made everything by hand and anything she didn't make by hand was a discovery and the discovery was often something that was found in a thrift store that was half broken or falling apart. Or it was something an artisan only made a few of, but we couldn't afford so we would just go and look at it every day and one day she would just buy it and hide it from my dad."

Lively, who lives in Westchester, New York (not too far from Stewart) with her hubby of almost two years Ryan Reynolds, didn't let many people around her know that she was launching Preserve. "It's what I know better than acting so being in this space is something I've done my whole life, just not professionally," Lively explained. "So now it's something that I get to share with more people. I've been sharing it with friends forever. I didn't even tell most friends that I was doing it because they still get their own curated products and gifts from me. I'm that girl."

And also the girl who has idolized Martha.

"Who doesn't want to be Martha Stewart?" Lively said. "Martha Stewart has been a huge inspiration to me my entire life. She's a huge source of inspiration for my mom. She's how I came to know and love Martha. I always say that Martha Stewart Living is the only magazine I ever had growing up. I never had Tiger Beat or any of that stuff."