Blake Lively Reshoots the End of Her Story
What it Takes to Correct the TikTok Narrative
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This is a story about Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. But it’s also a story about a very particular moment in celebrity gossip.
On December 21st, the New York Times published an investigative piece with claims that ricocheted around family conversations and friend gatherings for weeks to come. It wasn’t about Trump, or Hunter Biden, or healthcare malfeasance. It was about two stars — Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni — fighting to own the narrative of who behaved worse on the set of their latest film, It Ends with Us, adapted from the bestselling Colleen Hoover novel about a woman who attempts to break her family’s pattern of domestic abuse.
If you’re at all plugged into the world of celebrity gossip, you probably heard something around the time of the film’s release about Lively being “difficult.” She was a pain on set; she “stole” the final edit of the film from Baldoni and his producing partner; she had her husband, Ryan Reynolds, unfollow Baldoni on Instagram. She was “tone-deaf” for not talking about domestic abuse during the press tour, and talked too much about her new haircare line. Interactions from her past — most vividly, a 2016 junket interview with Norwegian journalist Kjersti Flaa, which Flaa uploaded to YouTube with the title “The Blake Lively Interview That Made Me Want To Quit My Job” — magically emerged to confirm the obvious: what a bitch.
I felt it myself. Lively has never been my favorite celebrity, in part because of her previous (tone-deaf) plantation-themed wedding and her very 2014 (and short-lived) brand Preserve, which sold products Vanity Fair aptly described as “seemingly designed for a southern-themed bridal shower.” She didn’t seem particularly savvy to me, a characteristic I personally gravitate towards when it comes to celebrities. But because of my work in the history of celebrity gossip, I could also see how the narrative was confirming my least charitable thinking. Everything felt just a little too on the nose, exploiting everyone’s least charitable thoughts about a beautiful woman (and mother of four) who’s also married to a huge movie star (and best friends with Taylor Swift).
The entire thing felt off. Why was Justin Baldoni — best known as playing the lead heartthrob in the CW show Jane the Virgin — directing this movie? How did Blake Lively convince the studio to do reshoots? Did Ryan Reynolds really write a substantial portion of a key scene and Baldoni didn’t know about it? Was Baldoni boxed out of promoting the film? Why did all the women seem to support Lively? Who was leaking the story about the “bad blood” between the two of them to Variety? (“There’s probably no world where these two will work together again.”) Why, as Lainey Gossip smartly noted, was a guy who was supposedly the spokesperson for non-toxic masculinity hiring the same PR crisis firm that represents Johnny Depp?
It Ends With Us ended up grossing $351 million worldwide — a genuine hit for a non-super-hero movie. And yet, as Lainey put it, “it wasn’t a celebration for Blake Lively, because social media, particularly TikTok, turned hard against her. She and Jennifer Lopez probably top the list for TikTok’s Most Hated for 2024.”
If you don’t spend time on TikTok, this might seem like it’s not that big of a deal. Some people make short videos about why she sucks, who cares. But TikTok has established itself as a pillar of contemporary celebrity image formation — with arguably more power than any traditional print publication, gossip or otherwise. Once a particular understanding of a star gains traction on TikTok (usually in the form of narration/commentary on a series of images or clips) it trickles up to the gossip magazines, who then package that understanding to the audience they crave most: young/younger people who spend a lot of time on their phones.
A celebrity can try to modify the narrative through a big profile in, say, Vogue — or by “speaking” a new meaning through posed paparazzi shots, or releasing a statement on their social media. But we are years away from the days when a star could “set the record straight” through an interview with Barbara Walters or an exclusive with People. Today, the dominant meaning of a celebrity congeals (and is refined) on TikTok.
The technology of TikTok might be new, but the shift itself has precedence. The history of celebrity gossip is the history of the power of meaning-making pinballing between 1) the studios that create star vehicles; 2) the publications that collaborate closely with the studios to promote those vehicles; 3) the scandal/gossip publications and paparazzi that trouble or undercut the narrative; 4) the stars themselves and 5) the consumers of those stars.
In Classic Hollywood, the power rested firmly in the hands of the studios and the fan magazines; in the 1950s, the power began to shift towards the stars (and scandal magazines and paparazzi). In the 1990s and early 2000s, the power was in the hands of the stars and power publicists; by 2005, the gossip press, upstart gossip blogs (many of them run by “normal” people, like The Fug Girls, Perez Hilton, and Lainey Gossip) and digital paparazzi had wrested away the narrative, astonishing the established guard. In the 2010s, the power was back in the hands of the celebrities, who “made their own paparazzi” through social media.
Now, the power is shifting away from the stars — whose socials have come to feel hyper-curated and inauthentic — and towards “normal” people making meaning of those stars on TikTok, Reddit, and Instagram. And, like so many other cultural shifts right now, it’s facilitated (and accelerated) by the decline of traditional media, from women’s magazines to the “decent” celebrity publications like People (the decline of which I’ve written about in detail).
TikTok (and YouTube, which will attempt to take over TikTok’s role when it becomes unusable in the U.S. later this month) now competes with reality television as the primary generator of micro- and mid-level celebrity (see: the rapid rise of Jools LeBron) and the primary home for discourse about celebrity. The algorithm will feed you a clip of a celeb on a red carpet and follow it almost immediately with a clip of a plastic surgeon breaking down that celebrity’s various facial reconstructions; if you watch the second one longer, it’ll stop showing you the initial clips and just show you the commentary (on that celeb and so many others). It can sense if you like to talk shit, then feed you the cattiest category of shit possible, but it can also sense if you just like cute montages of a queer celebrity couple set to a Taylor Swift soundtrack.
It hones in on your gossip personality, expands it, and sets up residency there. And again, even if you’re not on TikTok, you’re still absorbing these messages as they filter into “mainstream” celebrity discourse. They’re the neighbor in your thin-walled apartment listening to their music dialed up to 11. The bass just becomes part of your reality.
Which is part of why the New York Times investigation that dropped on December 21st felt like such a bombshell: it showed how powerful TikTok had become in shaping the narrative — but also how readily it could be manipulated.
That investigation was titled “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” and was co-authored by Megan Twohey (of Harvey Weinstein expose fame), Mike McIntire, and Julie Tate. Like any Times investigation, there’s a tremendous amount of rigor, reporting, and fact-checking that went into the process — these reporters worked their asses off. But they were also working with piles of documents, obtained via subpoena, related to a legal complaint, which had been officially filed by Lively just the day before. The article states that “these and other documents were reviewed by the New York Times,” which, along with other details from the piece, strongly implies that Lively’s team approached the Times with the story.
This happens all the time in journalism, it’s just that sometimes the details come from a whistleblower, and sometimes they come from a person who knows they have the goods — which, in this case, were a bunch of text messages confirming that something was, indeed, off when it came to the discourse around Likely surrounding the release of the film. Many of you have read the piece, but if you haven’t, it’s worth your time — as is the full legal complaint, which you can read here.
In the complaint, Lively alleges a long list of shitty behavior on-set, particularly around the filming of intimate scenes, which culminated in Lively’s decision to wrest control of the final edit of the film, Reynolds blocking Baldoni on Instagram, and Lively’s refusal to appear in publicity with Baldoni. That’s when Baldoni contracted with the crisis PR firm headed by Melissa Nathan (who represents Deep) — and the plans for the “untraceable” online “social combat” offensive against Lively began to take form.
They planted stories with various online outlets, including The Daily Mail. They boosted social media posts that fit with the image of Lively as a tone-deaf, out-of-touch, exacting bitch. They ensured that stories about an HR complaint filed against Baldoni on-set didn’t make it to print. As for the video from the Norwegian journalist — she claims that she didn’t participate in a coordinated attack, but she also previously posted clips of interviews with Amber Heard when she was involved in a bitter legal dispute with Nathan’s client Johnny Depp (the videos were hashtagged #JusticeforJohnny Depp). (If you’re unfamiliar with the Depp/Heard trial, here’s a solid overview).
It’s been a long time — maybe since the initial Weinstein expose, and the subsequent reporting by Roman Farrow — since I’ve seen a piece that lays the contemporary machinations of Hollywood this bare. For me, it’s the text messages that make it feel irrefutable: the way they say they can’t put it in writing that they can “bury” someone and then say WE CAN BURY ANYONE. It’s fucking wild! They weren’t even using Signal! Amateur hour!!! (See also: this post from one of the studio’s publicists defending herself in a private Facebook group. It is something!)
The Times piece confirmed what many people suspect, at least in this moment, when it comes to apparatuses of power: that they’re controlled by a nefarious army of people working in the shadows to manipulate the public. Or, when it comes to celebrity: that the public only has access to an outer layer of self and truth. Below, there’s “true” self — wanton, badly behaved, racist, immoral — just waiting to be revealed. In truth, that’s what made the TikToks about Lively take off in the first place: they confirmed what people wanted to believe about Lively’s “true” self beneath the beautiful exterior.
In the immediate aftermath of the piece, I saw arguments that Lively was just as manipulative as Baldoni — she just had the cache to plant her narrative in the New York Times, instead of with a motley crew of tabloid reporters and social media creators. It was so classically Lively — such a controlling bitch move — to go to the Times.
But Lively, like Baldoni, was playing the publicity game. She just played it with a lot more skill — and with irrefutable evidence of unacceptable and unprofessional behavior. It’s clear, at this point, that Lively will win this war. Baldoni’s team is attempting to discredit the Times reporting, threatening to release “the receipts” that show how the text messages have been taken out of context. Lively, by contrast, has followed the same playbook she’s followed from the start: She doesn’t tell. She shows.
She hasn’t shamed TikTokers who participated in the narrative, or turned her husband on people in the Instagram comments, or singled out the Norwegian journalist who created a central plot point in the narrative against her. She seems to know, from past and present experience, how readily those attempts could be turned against her. Instead, she and her team used the legal system to subpoena text messages and other communications, nesting the findings within a larger picture of what happened on set — and then worked to position those findings within the legitimized format of investigative journalism. In the process, Lively also aligned the story with a major name responsible for shifting the narrative of abuse of women in Hollywood.
It’s strategic, sure. But so is every celebrity disclosure. Does it detract from her claims? I’d argue no.
The balance of publicity power in Hollywood is in flux — as so clearly evidenced by the success of Baldoni’s smear campaign. But traditional strategies, when negotiated correctly, can still redirect the narrative overnight.
Crucially, Lively has not painted herself as a saint. As one reader put it to me, it’s easy for people like us to still kinda dislike her and also believe that this happened to her. She managed to prove gossip consumers right (yes, everything is manipulated) and wrong (no, she’s not the villain). She pitched a big, welcoming tent for believers: longtime fans, ambivalent observers, people who tolerated her but never loved her. That includes me, of course. I’ve revised my opinion of her entirely: she’s incredibly savvy.
She’s also a survivor. Not of the sort of physical abuse endured by her character in It Ends With Us — I wouldn’t equate the two. But she did survive a campaign that understood exactly how to exploit its audience’s most misogynistic tendencies. She had the resources and privilege and power, financial and otherwise, to reshoot the end of her story. She was able to make herself believable. Vanishingly few women do. ●
Further reading from a few of my trusted gossip analysts on Lively/Baldoni: Hung Up, Lainey Gossip, and The Fug Girls, all worth your time.
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