What Happened on the Set of ‘It Ends With Us’?

By Emma Chance | Film | August 8, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Film | August 8, 2024 |

I sincerely hoped I would be able to avoid It Ends With Us, but I forgot that Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds are the King and Queen of movies in Taylor Swift’s economy, and so they currently control the entertainment news cycle, and at the end of the day I am but a Newsie shouting “Extree, extree!” on the street corner. I will withhold my feelings about the book by Colleen Hoover the film is based on, because I don’t feel like being a literature snob today. I’m here to tell you that something may have gone down between director and actor Justin Baldoni and the rest of the cast on that set.

I had never heard of Justin Baldoni before this. Some cursory research reveals that he’s a C-list actor who has directed a documentary series about people with terminal illness, My Last Days, and a dramatic film about teens with terminal illness, Five Feet Apart. He’s the author of two books: Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity, a memoir in which he “challenges men to be brave enough to be vulnerable, to be strong enough to be sensitive, to be confident enough to listen,” and Boys Will Be Human: A Get-Real Gut-Check Guide to Becoming the Strongest, Kindest, Bravest Person You Can Be, which seems like the first one but for kids. I can’t find anything to explain the interest in terminal illness, which seems harmless and nice enough, but my spidey senses are most definitely tingling with those books. Hashtag red flag.

But let’s set that aside for a moment and talk about It Ends With Us. How Baldoni ended up as the director of the film, I can’t tell you. He told The Hollywood Reporter that he was originally just going to direct, admitting that he “wanted to try” playing what would become his role of Ryle, but was “afraid” because of the subject matter. Therein lies the rub: the film is about domestic violence, and Baldoni’s character is the abuser. Apparently, though, Hoover emailed him saying she could see him as Ryle, and that’s how it came to be.

He talked about filming the scenes depicting domestic violence and how much help he needed from Lively and female coordinators:

“The only way it was possible was I had an incredible intimacy coordinator, an incredible stunt coordinator—both of them were women—and then there was Blake, and honestly between those three women, they really were the ones choreographing and navigating all of those scenes because I needed to play Ryle. In those moments, to be perfectly frank, I really wasn’t the director, it was those women who were in charge. From the beginning I wanted all the intimate scenes to be from a female gaze and I never wanted my bias to potentially interject and go into the film.”

Okay, I don’t hate that. Like the use of “female gaze.” But he also admitted that playing such a dark character was a struggle:

“There were a lot of times where I would have to go privately into a room and just cry or shake it out and try to get him out of me and that energy out of me, because it’s too real. There are too many people that are the real-life Lily Blooms of the world that have to deal with that every single day, and I wanted it to be as real as possible and yet it was very hard to shoot those scenes.”

At the premiere, Justin Baldoni gets emotional talking about the dark scenes he worked on for #ItEndsWithUs, and how his intimacy coordinators and Blake Lively helped him get through it pic.twitter.com/G0g7go0OM8

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) August 7, 2024

Hmmm. It sounds like a normal reaction, honestly, but this is all I have to point to to explain the internet blowing up with theories about beef between him and the rest of the cast. A TikToker discovered that Lively, Jenny Slate, et al no longer follow Baldoni on Instagram, and fans have noticed that he’s been absent from all of the press appearances with the cast. Any promotion he has done has been by himself.

Drama with Justin Baldoni & the cast of It Ends With Us?
byu/galaxystars1 inpopculturechat

Slate was asked about working with him on the premiere red carpet and totally dodged the question, and he’s notably absent from all cast pictures from the premiere.

@deadline #JennySlate on working with #JustinBaldoni, who served as both scene partner and director to the actress in #ItEndsWithUsMovie ♬ original sound - Deadline

So, there is most certainly beef, though we will probably never know why. Best case scenario? Artistic differences. Worst case scenario? All those theories about masculinity made his depiction of an abuser, in his own words, “too real.”