Blake Lively costarred with Justin Baldoni in the 2024 romantic drama It Ends With Us, based on the popular novel by Colleen Hoover. Baldoni also directed the movie. The film came out in August, but people have been talking about it more than ever over the past few months thanks to a heated public back and forth between Lively and Baldoni. I doubted whether we'd ever talk about this whole situation on this website, but now there's a Game of Thrones angle, so we're going in.
First, let's quickly summarize the drama up to this point: during the press tour for It Ends With Us, Blake Lively got a lot of flack for being awkward and kind of tone-deaf on the press trail, and a narrative started to form about her being unpleasant and difficult to work with. The winds shifted when Lively filed a complaint in the California Civil Rights Department alleging that Baldoni and his producing partner Jamey Heath had acted very inappropriately on set. The allegations included that Baldoni made her get naked for scenes that didn't call for it, that he walked into her trailer uninvited when she was undressed, that he talked openly about his “pornography addiction,” that he showed her naked pictures of her wife, and more. She also alleges that Baldoni hired a PR firm called The Agency Group PR to smear Lively in the press, which could partially account for why she got so much criticism while promoting It Ends With Us.
Then, just the other day, it came out that Baldoni is suing Blake Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds for $400 million, claiming that they set out to destroy him. Included with his filing are a variety of text message exchanges with Lively. One of them involves a back-and-forth about Lively doing some rewrites on a scene from the movie. Baldoni alleges that he went over to Lively's house for dinner and that Reynolds (along with some other, unnamed famous person) popped in to praise Lively's changeds to the script. Baldoni alleges that he took this as something of a coded message that he needed to go along with Lively's suggestions.
That's all Baldoni's version of what happened in his complaint. Lively's actual text messages, which are free to read, aren't as clear-cut, although she does talk about Reynolds and the unnamed famous person being some of her most supportive creative partners, which is when she compared herself to Daenerys Targaryen:
"If you ever get around to watching Games of Thrones, you’ll appreciate that I’m Khaleesi, and like her, I happen to have a few dragons. For better or worse, but usually for better. Because my dragons also protect those I fight for. So really we all benefit from those gorgeous monsters of mine. 😂 You will too, I can promise you."
Lively's team has since responded to Baldoni's suit, disagreeing with the director's assertion that Lively “seized creative control” of the movie. “The evidence will also show that Sony asked Ms. Lively to oversee Sony’s cut of the film, which they then selected for distribution and was a resounding success,” their statement reads. “Their response to sexual harassment allegations: she wanted it, it’s her fault. Their justification for why this happened to her: look what she was wearing.”
"In short, while the victim focuses on the abuse, the abuser focuses on the victim. The strategy of attacking the woman is desperate, it does not refute the evidence in Ms. Lively’s complaint, and it will fail."
I also feel like I should mention that there are allegations that the character of "Nicepool," played by Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool & Wolverine, may be a mocking caricature of Baldoni, although the timing has been tricky to pin down. In any case, the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni situation has definitely got to be the celebrity feud of late 2024/early 2025, and I'm just happy we've gotten to the point where Game of Thrones is now a part of it.
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h/t NBC News