How Blake Lively’s fairytale was a PR nightmare

This should be the crowning moment of Blake Lively‘s career: she has just made the prestigious September issue of US Vogue, which she calls ‘a lifelong dream come true’.

The magazine returns the compliment with an article that is wildly flattering even by Vogue’s standards. It describes the 36-year-old actress as a ‘great movie star’, a ‘wonderful’ mother, and includes friends such as Hugh Jackman, Gigi Hadid and Taylor Swift singing her praises.

Lively is photographed festooned with Cartier diamonds, including a necklace which belonged to Elizabeth Taylor. She thanks Vogue’s Anna Wintour for being ‘in her corner’ and writes on Instagram: ‘This article feels like, if I was able to attend my own funeral & leave happy and alive.’

Alas, not everyone shares Vogue’s rose-tinted view of the erstwhile star of Gossip Girl. Lively’s launch of her new film, It Ends With Us, has been an unmitigated disaster.

From not so long ago being – with husband Ryan Reynolds – part of Hollywood’s most gilded couple, the actress finds herself fighting for her reputation amid a ‘Blakelash’ that keeps growing by the day.

It must have seemed a piece of PR good fortune when the release of It Ends With Us coincided with the launch of Lively’s new haircare range Blake Brown, which is sold exclusively at US supermarket Target and through Lively’s website. (Much has been made of the fact that you can buy her ­shampoo and hair masques for a ‘bargain’ price point of around £15 apiece.)

Even more fortuitously, this marketing opportunity has come at a once-in-a-generation moment of pop culture dominance for Lively and Reynolds.

Both have films topping the box office – he with the billion-dollar superhero blockbuster Deadpool & Wolverine; she with It Ends With Us, an adaptation of the 2016 novel which was filmed on a budget of $25million (£19million) and has taken $180million (£138million) so far.

There’s been nothing like it since Bruce ­Willis and Demi Moore were both riding high in 1990.

But the planned PR fairytale has turned into a nightmare.

Lively has come under fire for aggressively marketing her personal projects – not just her ­haircare, but her drinks company – seemingly on the back of a film dealing with domestic violence.

It End With Us may seem glossy to begin with, telling the story of Lily Bloom, a florist who moves to Boston and falls for charming neurosurgeon, Ryle Kincaid. But it soon turns dark, as Lily senses echoes of her parents’ tense and unhappy relationship in Ryle’s behaviour.

Incongruously, Lively seems to have been trying to sell the movie as a jolly rom-com. ‘Grab your friends, wear your florals, and head out to see it!’ she chirruped, despite the fact that (spoiler alert) Lily ultimately has to flee her abuser.

At best Lively was being insensitive – but worse was to come. At the after-party following the film’s premiere, a cocktail, made with her alcohol range, Betty Buzz, was called the ‘Ryle you wait’, a ­reference to the abusive male character who throws the woman she plays down the stairs.

Given the link between domestic violence and alcohol plus Lively’s floundering attempts to address the issue in interviews (she advised victims to ‘like, location share?’, in other words, to let friends know where you are) – this set off a fire-storm of criticism.

Meanwhile, a side drama about an allegedly toxic working environment with her co-star Justin Baldoni on set has led to some people taking his side rather than hers.

It’s complex – who can really say why two people didn’t get along? But her chief complaint seems to be that Baldoni, who is also the movie’s director, asked how much she weighed as he was going to have to pick her up during the film and he suffers with a bad back.

Lively, a mother of four, cried fat-shaming. Baldoni’s defenders point out that he didn’t ask Lively but an intermediary, his trainer, who was supervising the stunt, and had no intention whatsoever of embarrassing her.

As the backlash has grown, previous bitchy comments to reporters have resurfaced. Principally, this includes the time when one luckless interviewer congratulated her on her ‘little bump’ – Lively was pregnant – and Lively shot back her congratulations to the woman, who was not pregnant, on her own ‘little bump’. If you were so minded, you might consider that a rather thoughtless remark.

It’s all the more unfortunate as the interviewer in question, Kjersti Flaa, has not been able to have children and found it intensely upsetting. ‘To be honest, it hurts because I obviously wasn’t pregnant and I could never get pregnant,’ she said. ‘So to me, that comment was like a bullet.’

The troublesome topic of Lively’s ill-judged wedding in 2012, held on a plantation with a row of nine slave cabins (for which she and Reynolds later apologised ‘unreservedly’), has also been mentioned online.

Gossip about feuds with previous co-stars, among them Anna Kendrick and Leighton Meester, has been reignited, too.

The upshot is that Vogue’s diamond-clad movie star is being seen by some to look more like a ‘mean girl’.

It looks like a ‘five star ****-show’ according to one awed publicist, who has been observing Lively’s astonishing fall from grace. What makes it all the more surprising is that Lively is looked after by the hugely respected PR veteran Leslie Sloane (who works with Katie Holmes and Lindsay Lohan) – but perhaps she’s not been taking Sloane’s advice.

The seeds of this current drama date back to 2019, when Justin Baldoni bought the rights to the hugely successful It Ends With Us novel.

Baldoni had previously directed a romance movie, Five Feet Apart, about a teen with cystic fibrosis who falls in love, then founded his own company, Wayfarer Studios. Lively was a catch – a mark of her importance to the project is that she was given a producer credit.

But it seems that once ­production began she did far more than turn up and deliver her lines – instead, her influence drew the rest of the cast into her orbit and away from Baldoni, whose movie it was.

‘Because of her status and because of Ryan’s status, [the couple] were followed. People follow where the power is,’ I’m told.

There are reports that Lively and Baldoni differed about the edit of the film. He was apparently backed by the studio Sony. She was backed by Colleen Hoover, author of the original bestselling book on which the film is based.

Lively had her own make up artist on set and her own hair stylist – not unusual for a star of this calibre, although it was a relatively low-budget film. She also had two assistants and two personal trainers, which is slightly more unusual.

The end credits of the film, perhaps, give a clue to what went on. Baldoni gives special thanks to one person, his wife, Emily.

Lively thanks 14 people, including her celebrity pals Britney Spears, ­Bradley Cooper and Taylor Swift (her music is in the film), plus both her mother Elaine (‘Ms Lively wishes to extend special thanks to’) and her children James, nine, Inez, seven, Betty, four and Olin, one, plus husband Ryan who is thanked as ‘Gordon’ Reynolds – an in-joke.

She also thanks Shawn Levy, who directed Reynolds in Deadpool & Wolverine, which some take as an indication that – as unconfirmed reports have suggested – she insisted on some script and editing changes to It Ends With Us and brought in input from her husband and his friend Levy. This, it has been suggested, may be where the conflict started.

By the time of the film’s premiere, Baldoni was walking the red carpet alone and none of his co-stars were posing with him or following him on social media. Asked if he might make a sequel, Baldoni grimaced: ‘I think Blake Lively’s ready to direct, that’s what I think.’

At the same event, Lively revealed that her husband had helped to script the film – which was news to the film’s writer.

Lively told US TV channel E! News: ‘The iconic rooftop scene, my husband actually wrote it. Nobody knows that but you now.’ She added: ‘We help each other. He works on everything I do; I work on everything he does. So his wins, his celebrations are mine and mine are his.’

The rooftop scene is early in the film when Lily Bloom first meets Ryle Kincaid. The film’s screenwriter, Christy Hall said: ‘There were a couple of little things that I thought had been improvised. Like when he says, ‘Pretty please with a cherry on top,’ and she talks about the maraschino cherries. When I saw a cut I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cute. That must have been a cute improvised thing.’ So if I’m being told that Ryan wrote that, then great, how wonderful.’

Did Baldoni think it was equally wonderful? His publicist declines to comment – but it seems likely he didn’t.

But then the whole project seems to have been subsumed into a merchandising opportunity for Lively and her husband. The couple – both child stars – met on the set of The Green Lantern in 2010 and have been married for 12 years.

Recently they have started to cross-pollinate their projects and commercial ventures: Reynolds has played a big role in the It Ends With Us promo tour, filming skits for his wife’s Instagram page and bringing Deadpool & Wolverine co-star Hugh Jackman along to the New York premiere.

She posted a Deadpool mask on her Instagram covered with floral patterns — a nod to her florist character in It Ends With Us.

Deadpool & Wolverine features a cameo from Lively and two of their young children as well as players from Wrexham AFC, the Welsh football team bought by Reynolds and actor Rob McElhenney in 2020.

Lively’s It Ends With Us-themed cocktail recipes feature her Betty Buzz and Betty Booze brands but also Reynolds’ Aviation American Gin. The gin has also been referenced in the Deadpool franchise, and Lively’s character in the 2018 thriller A Simple Favor also drank Aviation Gin.

No wonder a critic calls It Ends With Us an ‘inappropriately gorgeous domestic violence movie… synergised for maximum profitability with a host of other business endeavours’.

(To be fair, sources sympathetic to Lively say the film was actually supposed to come out in February, and that the timing of its launch at the same juncture as her haircare brand is purely coincidental.)

Does it matter? The social media reaction suggests maybe it does.