It Ends With Us co-star Brandon Sklenar wades into Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni alleged feud

Blake Lively’s It Ends With Us co-star Brandon Sklenar has weighed into the off-screen drama that has consumed the movie’s release.

Since the start of promotions for the romantic drama based on Colleen Hoover’s best-seller, speculation of a behind-the-scenes feud between Lively and her co-star and director Justin Baldoni has taken over the film’s discourse.

Lively has also been criticised for launching her line of haircare products to coincide with the release of It Ends With Us, and for a series of awkward media interviews both for the movie and historically.

The movie tells the story of a young florist who falls in love with a neurosurgeon only for his behaviour to trigger memories of trauma stemming from her parents’ abusive marriage.

Sklenar, who plays the film’s second love interest Atlas and is best known for a role on Yellowstone prequel 1923, posted an open letter on Instagram to address “all this stuff swirling online”.

He wrote, “Colleen and the women of this cast stand for hope, perseverance, and for women choosing a better life for themselves.

“Vilifying the women who put so much of their heart and soul into making this film because they believe so strongly in its message seems counterproductive and detracts from what this film is about. It is, in fact, the opposite of the point.

“What may or may not have happened behind the scenes does not and hopefully should not detract from what our intentions were in making this film. It’s been disheartening to see the amount of negativity projected online.”

Even though Sklenar ended his long message with a plea to people to stop the speculation and focus on the film’s themes of intimate partner violence, his post has only fanned the flames.

While he didn’t specifically name Lively, his defence of “the women of the cast” has led to conjecture that he must be in her corner in the purported conflict.

It should be noted that Sklenar did write “there isn’t a single person involved in the making of this film that was not aware of the responsibility we had in making this”.

The drama kicked off after It Ends With Us’ New York premiere when online “sleuths” noticed Lively and Baldoni standing apart and not posing for any paired or group photos together. They also did not do any promotional interviews together, which is unusual for the two leads of a film.

When chatter emerged of bad blood between Baldoni and Lively and Baldoni and Hoover, he hired a PR crisis manager.

The Hollywood Reporter quoted unnamed sources that said Baldoni and Lively, who was also a producer, commissioned competing edits of the movie.

Lively also revealed in an interview that her husband Ryan Reynolds had written the dialogue for a pivotal scene in the film, which was news to the film’s screenwriter, although the writer did not take issue with it.

It all fed into a narrative that perhaps Lively was “controlling” behind the scenes, which wasn’t helped when Baldoni said he wouldn’t direct a sequel and added, “I think Blake Lively is ready to direct”.

His production partner Jamey Heath denied Baldoni had implied Lively had acted as a de facto director.

Lively too has come under sustained online attacks, which included the resurfacing of interviews she gave years earlier in which she appeared to have been short or dismissive of interviewers’ questions, and used the word “trannies” from promotional activities during her Gossip Girl tenure in the late-2000s.