Come alively
I know we’ve lost the plot when I found myself bringing up Blake Lively in therapy this week.
Blake Lively has found herself in the center of an internet shitstorm mostly of her own making. There are rumors and theories and bad interviews and compilations showing how she bungled a movie that was (imho) always destined to be bungled. It’s a bad book, a bad author, a bad-faith promo cycle.
And at the heart of it is the internet’s blonde-maned darling, Blake Lively.
She’s one-half of the Ryan Reynolds/Blake Lively PR machine. This is the “it” couple of a specific corner of the internet, selling approachable, sarcastic, not so serious celebre. They have empire after empire—soccer teams, gin companies, Mint Mobile, Betty Buzz—all with little to no traditional press cycles to kowtow towards. In fact, Ryan has his own machine and marketing agency, Maximum Effort. They’re funny. A particular set of humor, but clever and punny and reactive. Together, Ryan and Blake seem to share a language, one best perceived through snarky, quirky instagram captions and stories all at the other one's expense.
And it worked for them.
This is a couple who withstood controversy after controversy. Meeting on the set of Green Lantern in the midst of Ryan’s divorce from other it girl, Scarlett Johansson. Getting married on an actual plantation. Starting up a lifestyle website that literally published an ode to the antebellum South. They were cocooned in a blanket of likeability and humor and—crucially—relatability. Never mind that they weren’t all that great at their jobs.
Ryan Reynolds struggled through romcoms and bad action flicks until finally finding his sweet spot with the Deadpool franchise. Blake Lively remains beloved for Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Gossip Girl and, personally, A Simple Favor. But she was more the fashion girlie, someone to look to for quirky choices and Met Gala moments. They found their lane and stuck to it, overselling products no one really needs but everyone seemed charmed by.
So everyone was—to borrow a phrase from their bestie Taylor Swift—ready for it when this summer finally saw them both getting moments on the big screen. Deadpool & Wolverine was a huge hit. Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds ate up the press tour, appearing everywhere and doing everything and it paid off in a big way. And since it came out just a couple weeks before Blake Lively’s premiere of It Ends With Us, no one batted an eye at first when the broiest couple of all bros showed up to all of Blake’s promo.
At first it was all “couples goals” and funny skits. Sure, Blake Lively also chose this movie to cross-promote her new hair care line Blake Brown. But she was having fun.
And then she wasn’t.
In a sort of perfect storm of boredom and predictable internet whiplash, TikTok started running wild with speculations of an alleged rift between the stars of the film Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni—she, a producer; him, the director. He wasn’t on any of the joint press events, they never posed together on a single red carpet, and they even watched the movie at different New York premieres.
For a few moments, people thought it was Don’t Worry, Darling all over again. They were hungry for it. And both stars definitely started to worry. But the internet zeroed in on one Miss Blake Lively.
I believe celebrities are worse than they appear, that they exist on a scale of harm and indifference and I don’t really trust them to be for the people. Blake (and Ryan) never bothered me but it was kind of cringey to see how she handled this movie’s press. After all, it’s a story about domestic violence—sexual and physical—and generational trauma. And yet all Blake wanted to talk about was costumes and hair and florals. So many florals. It was cringe. It was ick. It was all wrong.
But it wasn’t ever going to be about just her media training. We love a good spiral. A good conspiracy. A good takedown. And as someone who can see and enjoy a compilation of celebrities being the absolute worst, I hate when it takes a turn into something more nefarious. Because it should never be that deep.
Do I think Blake Lively is probably pretty stuck up, self-absorbed and mostly clueless? Yes.
But I also think Ryan Reynold’s is too. Probably Hugh Jackman. Even, in spite of his superior media training, Justin Baldoni.
And yet—
Ryan Reynold’s plays with the same sort of sarcastic schtick. On the surface, he is rude in interviews, he constantly plays off real questions with jokes, he can’t stop referencing his own side projects and businesses. The very essence of Deadpool is self-referential/cross promotion.
So why is he funny and Blake Lively is instantly labeled a bitch?
Dare I say it’s ✨ misogyny ✨
This isn’t me holding a camcorder up to my crying face screaming “Leave Blake alone!” It’s me begging people to notice the patterns we play into and the context we ignore.
Do you think she just fell out of a coconut tree??
To me, it’s obvious there is a lot more at play than just “mean girl finally gets her comeuppance.” Blake is a self-proclaimed shy person who has to contend with a partner who walks through the spotlight with ease and who has positioned herself—from a distance—as being someone equally funny and quick and charming. She hasn’t done a press tour in almost a decade basically (raising kids while saying they “take turns” working….) so here she is watching Ryan and Hugh absolutely rock it, only knowing how to sell things with humor, and attempting her own ~Movie Star~ moment.
Every bad interview around It Ends With Us seems to be her trying to make a joke. And of course her jokes don’t land because her jokes are about jewelry being her comfort blanket or her disinterest in strangers approaching her (I’m sorry, it’s a weird question). The only time she seems comfortable is talking about clothes and talking about her hair. That might make her shallow but it can’t make her any more nefarious than her husband only ever joking about being a bad dad.
The pile on turns me off because it’s never in good faith. It’s about making leaps, laughing, mocking, shouting louder than the rest to justify our dislike of a woman. Because it’s always a woman. The internet never comes together to hate on a man unless he has raped or killed—and even then it takes about 47 journalists, 14 court cases, and at least two documentaries for us to begin to believe it.
If you google “most annoying celebrities” you get a graveyard of once-upon-a-time internet darlings. Brie Larson. Chrissy Teigen. Madonna. J-Lo. Kim Kardashian. Demi Lovato. Taylor Swift. Anne Hathaway. Meghan Markle. Amber Heard.
Meanwhile Brad Pitt is doing fine. Johnny Depp is doing fine. Casey Affleck is doing his own press tour apologizing for chewing gum at the SAGs as if that’s the reason people were upset by his Oscar win.
People can cause real harm and not be met with this sort of gleeful takedown. And we want to say it’s because she deserves it, she doesn’t get it. But this is not about justice for DV victims. And the book handles all that pretty poorly too. Our turning against Blake Lively isn’t repairing any harm done.
We aren’t using this as a moment of self-reflection to say “hmm, maybe I shouldn’t be so attached to these millionaires and their presumed charm.” It’s not like we’re waking up to celebrity culture or deconstructing our need for icons and idolization. We fall into the same traps. The same routine. The same jokes and compilations and tweets about “I never liked her” where vibes become our reality without a willingness to acknowledge systemic biases.
The only facts we have:
Justin and Blake did not do any press together
Blake is bad at press
Blake is bad at talking about a book that is bad at talking about domestic violence
None of the cast follows Justin, the director, on social media
None of the cast has talked about Justin as a director
Justin hired a PR firm specializing in crisis management for the likes of Johnny Depp and Aaron Paul—immediately, even when the bad news was not about him
Only after that did old videos start to go viral of bad Blake press; TikTok accounts dedicated to not liking Blake pop up; entire articles are written about how she bungled the press after no one batted an eye during the press tour
“Maybe now we’re seeing the real Blake Lively.” Bitch, these are old clips! They’ve been here all along. We’re interpreting them differently which is fine, but we have to acknowledge the context. And to check ourselves before we just decide she’s annoying ergo she is wrong.
If you want to take sides, at least consider all the rumors:
That Blake was overinvolved, even going as far as making a second cut of the film even though it was her job as Executive Producer to have her hands in everything
That Justin was aggressive on set, making people uncomfortable including Blake feeling fat shamed for her postpartum body
That Blake, in a bungled interview, admitted she didn’t like feeling like the intimacy coordinator on this film
That Ryan somehow rewrote a crucial scene during a writer’s strike and the film’s writer didn’t even know it had been rewritten
That Justin hired an aggressive crisis firm even though the press was in his favor at the time (which seems pretty suss to me)
That Blake did wear many hats in this movie as the producer but that never seemed to be a problem with Justin who complimented her involvement multiple times throughout the press tour
That none of the cast wants to talk about Justin or follow Justin or do press with Justin
What does this mean we know? Absolutely nothing, except celebrities care about their image more than anything else. Some are better at protecting it than others. Half of them have the odds stacked against them for the mere fact of being women. And most celebrity beefs/feuds/falling outs/riffs are all managed in shadowed rooms dedicated to manipulating the general public. That’s us!
If you find yourself upset over having been “fooled” by Blake Lively, I beg you to step back from caring about these people at all. If you think it’s fun to drag a stranger on line just because everyone else is doing it, maybe go touch grass? These reactions might seem at odds but I don’t believe they are. I love mess, I love watching celebrities trip over their own hubris. What are we owed, what do we expect? These are interesting questions as we contend with celebrity in our crumbling world. We can roll our eyes at another out of touch celebrity without adding to a culture of sexism and misogyny and double standards, playing into the hands of people where her downfall is their windfall.
She’s not a victim. Blake Lively, Betty Buzz, Blake Brown—all these iterations of the pretty, blonde, nepo-baby will be fine. She will learn she shines best when limiting press engagements. She and Taylor will commiserate and possibly write a song about being so misunderstood. Maybe she will direct the sequel or maybe she won’t. Justin Baldoni probably was a dick/is a dick. Maybe more will come out, maybe it won’t. The internet will choose a new boyfriend, a new mean girl. The cycle will continue on. I guess I write all this to say it was fun and now it’s not. I’m not sure there’s a way to articulate that line. But I wish we’d stop crossing it.
Great title. For a split second I considered reading and watching IEWU before realizing I’d only be doing it because it’s popular and I gotta stop doing that.
I didn’t realize all this was happening.
I’d love your take on how Raygun has been treated and how sexism has played into that as well.