Blake Lively struggled to convey emotion without her eyes in new film

Blake Lively's role as a blind woman in new movie All I See Is You made it tough for her to connect emotionally onscreen with her co-star Jason Clarke.

The Gossip Girl star had to learn how to act without the use of her eyes for part of the psychological drama, about a woman who undergoes life-changing surgery to regain her sight after being blinded in a car accident as a child.

Blake used special contact lenses to cloud her vision in the film, and although she soon got used to using her other senses to find her way around the set, it took some time for her to properly convey her character's feelings onscreen to her movie husband, portrayed by Jason.

"I got to know the whole set and everything with the blind contact lenses, I had lenses that would take away my sight completely," she explained on breakfast show Good Morning America. "Everything else (other senses) is heightened when you don't have your sight to rely on."

"The hardest part is looking in the eyes of your co-star when you're having an emotional moment...," she continued. "You have to rely on each other emotionally in a way when you don't have the eyes to rely on, it's like there's a greater connectivity, so it was really heavy."

Luckily, Blake was able to draw from the real-life experience of one of the film's technicians, who had actually previously undergone a cornea transplant to regain her vision - much like the star's character in All I See Is You.

"When I have the moment when I regain my sight (in the film), after I have the surgery, it was really like I was playing to her, like, 'Is this accurate? Is this how you really felt?'," the actress recalled. "So it was just so nice to be able to have people around that could help us tell the story authentically."

The emotional aspect of the movie, written and directed by Marc Forster, is also what inspired Blake to ditch her usual no-nudity clause to take on the role of Gina and strip off onscreen for the first time in her career, and she's glad she did.

"It's the performance that I'm most proud of," she recently told Vanity Fair.