Blake Lively’s It Ends With Us backlash, explained

Blake Lively’s It Ends With Us is the second biggest movie in America, but it’s the conflict surrounding the film — not the film itself — that everyone’s talking about.

Apparently, Lively and her co-stars are feuding with lead and director Justin Baldoni. Baldoni and Lively reportedly didn’t get along, and he allegedly “fat-shamed” her by asking someone how much Lively weighed — a scene involving the two requires he pick her up and he was afraid of hurting his back. And according to whispers, he didn’t very much enjoy Lively inviting her husband Ryan Reynolds on set to direct some scenes.

But while Baldoni is getting plenty of static here (he’s gone so far as to hire a veteran crisis PR manager who counts Johnny Depp among her clients), the hullabaloo has many online looking a little more closely at Lively, who is showing her face on the big screen for the first time in four years. Many have noted that Lively has taken a peculiar approach in promoting this film. In an attempt to sell this movie, Lively has promised viewers the giggliest, girliest of times. At the same time, the actor, known for her beautiful hair, launched a haircare line.

This sisterhood of traveling Stanley cups approach is in stark contrast to the movie’s plot: Lively’s protagonist, a budding florist named Lily Bloom, falls in love with a physically abusive man (Baldoni). Lively’s seeming lack of concern or emotional intelligence about this sensitive topic has raised questions and backlash about whether she knows what kind of movie she’s made, and it’s making some question what we thought we knew about Lively herself.

Movie press tours are not a thrilling business. They mostly consist of actors fielding the same questions over and over from a variety of media outlets, all in the hopes that they say something that spurs you to see the film they’re promoting. The monotonous repetition of the cinematic publicity cycle is exactly why Lively and It Ends With Us’s unusual tour has been so attention-grabbing.

For starters, Lively and director and co-star Baldoni have been promoting the film separately — an extremely strange thing for leads to do. They’re also doing these interviews, as my colleague Kyndall Cunningham detailed, amid a rash of back-and-forth gossip alleging the two fell out on set.

But what Lively has been saying in the promotion of the film is also drawing attention. In a video clip promoting the movie on TikTok, Lively says to “grab your friends, wear your florals, and head out to see it!”

In addition to Lively’s quip about girls’ night out to watch intimate partner abuse, she has been promoting both her new haircare line Blake Brown and her beverage company Betty Buzz. She’s used the red carpet to keep the public thinking about her husband’s new film, the hyper-violent and profane Marvel blockbuster Deadpool & Wolverine, while giving Reynolds — not screenwriter Christy Hall or author Colleen Hoover — credit for writing the movie’s “iconic” rooftop scene.

One promotional clip has her giggling with her co-stars about their zodiac signs, while another has Lively talking about wearing her own clothes in the movie — a move that seems to be connected to Lively styling one of her costars on one of the movie’s red carpets. And in one of her interviews, she’s asked by a journalist who’s clearly familiar with the movie’s sensitive themes about how the movie may inspire people to reach out to her and talk about abuse. Lively flippantly dismisses the question as a joke about hypothetically not sharing her location or phone number with those fans instead of, as many would have preferred, promoting domestic violence services.

Lively’s critics pointed out the disconnect between Lively framing her movie like a celebratory girls’ night and the actual content, in which a woman experiences violence from her romantic partner. Wearing florals and rounding up the girlies to watch a woman get physically abused by her partner seems, at best, a strange missing of the point and at worst, extremely insensitive or out of touch with the subject of her movie. Either Lively doesn’t fully comprehend the subject of the movie she made or she does and is capitalizing on it to sell her wares anyway.

While tabloids like TMZ are reporting on a behind-the-scenes PR war between Lively and Baldoni, this part of the backlash comes from Lively, all on her own, answering these questions the way she’s chosen to.

When actors have these moments where they seemingly stop acting like fun, good people, it often causes civilians to question whether said celebrity has always been like this or if they’re exhibiting some uncharacteristic behavior. Lively rose to fame playing the rich, carefree Serena van der Woodsen on Gossip Girl, and in many ways that character’s glamorous but selfish image has combined with her own. In her film hiatus, she’s been known more for her relationships than anything else — with Reynolds but perhaps more notably with Taylor Swift. This popularity perhaps contributes to, as one commenter put it, a “mean girl” vibe. Unfortunately for Lively and her image, she’s done some rather off-putting interviews that have been easy to find.

One of those interactions is a Café Society press junket on YouTube with the title “The Blake Lively interview that made me want to quit my job.” Journalist Kjersti Flaa uploaded her 2016 clip with Lively on August 10, right in the middle of this kerfuffle. In it, Flaa congratulates Lively on her pregnancy which Lively takes passive-aggressive offense to and responds by “congratulating” the not-pregnant Flaa on her own “bump.” (Prior to her interaction with Flaa, Lively had confirmed her pregnancy to the press.) After Lively’s quip, she and co-star Parker Posey barely make eye contact with Flaa, and Lively continues to dismiss or react aggressively to Flaa’s questions about the movie, almost pretending as if Flaa weren’t in the room.

During that same press tour, Lively also said that Café Society director Woody Allen was good, actually. At the time, Ronan Farrow had recently written a column in the Hollywood Reporter criticizing the movie industry’s response to his sister Dylan Farrow’s sex abuse allegations against their father. Lively, when asked about Allen, said: “I could [only] know my experience. And my experience with Woody is [that] he’s empowering to women.”

Going back further, critics found Lively’s first foray and faux pas into lifestyle branding. Back in 2014, Lively created a digital lifestyle and e-commerce site called Preserve. One of the first spreads was titled “The Allure of the Antebellum,” putting the site’s name in, let’s say, a certain light. The shoot was a romanticized version of the pre-Civil War South, and failed to address the reality that these cute outfits were anchored in a time of slavery. It’s also worth noting that Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds got married on a South Carolina plantation in 2012 (and later apologized), which may contextualize Lively’s fascination with antebellum aesthetics — though the actor was born and grew up in Los Angeles. (Reynolds, for his part, is famously from Canada.)

Lively’s Preserve lasted about one year.

It’s not difficult to connect the dots between Lively praising Woody Allen being good to women, Lively being palpably mean to a journalist, and Lively glossing over the egregious trauma and pain of slavery with the blithe way she’s behaving on the It Ends With US promotional circuit. While being famous and having every word you say recorded, especially ones that you regret, is not an easy job, this behavior fits a pattern that Lively has shown before.

A more telling frame for this messy kerfuffle might be recognizing that Lively and her husband have become more and more interested in the business side of their acting careers, perhaps even more than the acting.

In addition to Lively’s hair care line, soda line, and seemingly imminent fashion foray, Reynolds has invested in — and made himself the face of — more than a few companies. He has an ownership stake in telecom company Mint Mobile, the Welsh soccer club Wrexham, and had, until recently, a similar stake in Aviation Gin. He’s even the CEO of a marketing company, aptly called Maximum Effort. Lively and Reynolds are arguably more talented at selling their lifestyle and their names than they are at acting. To many people, drinking the same booze as Ryan Reynolds or having the same hair as Blake Lively is more desirable than watching a Ryan Reynolds or Blake Lively movie.

When movies are so clearly secondary to their personal brand, as we’ve seen with Lively and It Ends With Us, their films become commercials, avenues to further promote their brands and themselves. During the It Ends With Us press tour, Lively spoke not only about how Reynolds tinkered with the script, but shots in the film as well, and brought in Deadpool & Wolverine editor Shane Reid to help cut the movie. The plugs function as cross-promotion for her husband’s movie and his credibility as a director and actor.

With It Ends With Us, Lively was faced with a high-profile movie that features content that her brand probably doesn’t want to be associated with. Blake Lively the brand was at odds with Blake Lively the actor. In this case, the brand won out; Lively chose to put her efforts behind her brand. Unfortunately for that brand, it’s Blake Lively’s movie — and her complicated image — we can’t stop talking about.