Never again nevertheless had everything of a moving miracle. Inspired by Colleen Hoover’s bestseller, sold 10 million copies since its release in 2016, the film, shot for 25 million dollars in 2023, has raked in 400 million since its release in August 2024. An unexpected jackpot for its original producers, Jamey Heath and Justin Baldoni, co-founder of Wayfarer, as well as director and lead actor, with Blake Lively, in the role of Ryle Kincaid, Lily Bloom’s abusive on-screen husband. Sony Pictures, responsible for distribution, was salivating from the last takes at the idea of a sequel and a bittersweet franchise, marrying rose water to the subjects of women’s rights and domestic violence.
Hammering home your feminist credo
But strange rumors were already buzzing from Beverly Hills to New York. In mid-August, shortly after the film’s release, TMZ, leader of the tabloids on YouTube, was surprised by the absence of Justin Baldoni from many events linked to the premiere, and the always separate photo sessions of the two actors, soon furnishing a clandestine video taken during filming in the streets of Hoboken, near New York, which appeared to show a heated argument, almost an altercation between Lively and Baldoni. Creative quarrel between a director and his actress?
According to them, Blake Lively, established as a celebrity as much by her marriage to actor Ryan Reynolds as by her performances as a whimsical teenager in Gossip Girl et The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005), would have liked to water down the film to promote the romantic plot to the detriment of the sulphurous message against domestic violence, too disturbing for his 45 million followers on Instagram. Baldoni, for his part, increased his online interventions, scouring Hollywood fanzines since August to recall the painful fate of victims of abusive relationships and hammer home his feminist credo. As early as 2017, the actor had shaped his image as an enlightened post #MeToo man by a Ted Talk renamed, titled “Man Enough”, urging men to show themselves “man enough” to stand up against sexist stupidity and sexual harassment, and learn to “know how to be silent to listen to the voices of the women in our lives”. At the same time, the actor-director launched a men’s talk show broadcast on his Wayfarer Entertainment platform, then a podcast, Man Enough decorated with round tables of repentant machos.
“Never again”: should you go see the adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-seller with Blake Lively?
In September 2024, true to his reputation, he posted, in the name of Never again on his Instagram page, a missive addressed to “survivors” of sexual assault, renting “their resilience and courage” ; starting point of a personal themed campaign of “good guy” patented on all media which earned him, on December 9, “for her courage and compassion in defending women’s causes”, the badge of honor of the prize “voice of solidarity” by the influential Vital Voices association of women business leaders.
81-page complaint
The contrast with Blake Lively is striking. At the same time, the actress, who has since sworn to have followed the studio’s “media plan” to the letter, limits herself to “light events”, full of floral arrangements evoking his character from the film, perky interviews on the power of love “stronger than all injustice and iniquity”. While thousands of Internet users judge her “off the mark” on social networks, various mocking or vachard articles in the gossip pages of the Daily Mail a you New York Post describe her as at best scatterbrained, at worst motivated less by the cause of women than by her side businesses, a hair product company set up seven years ago, another of canned drinks – Betty Booze for cocktails, Betty Buzz for natural sodas. On Insta and TikTok, his rating collapsed, with no other explanation than the sudden anger of a hitherto devoted audience.
The pariah, however, raises her head on December 20. Blake Lively and her squad of lawyers filed that day in a Californian court, to everyone’s surprise, an 81-page complaint against director, actor and producer Justin Baldoni, his partner Jamey Heath and their army of publicists. , accusing them of “sexual and moral harassment”, of reprisals and various persecutions, including the ruin of the actress’ businesses. Above all, the litany of charges lifts the veil on the harsh reality of the filming. Blake Lively assures that in January 2024, upon returning from a long production shutdown due to a general strike by Hollywood actors, she summoned the entire team, including Baldoni, to demand a new agreement on the conditions working on the film. The actress requires the presence on the set of an “intimacy coordinator”, one of those consultants in high demand since the eruption of #MeToo, responsible for measuring the conformity of the filming of sex scenes and limiting the discomfort of actresses.
“Intimacy coordinator, I’m neither a cop nor a therapist”
Baldoni, feminist activist that he is, had crossed the line during kisses that were too fiery, burst into her dressing room when she was almost naked while removing makeup or breastfeeding her youngest, urgently requested scenes of sex absent from the scenario. The actor had heavily informed him of his past taste for porn films, provocatively inviting him to try the experience. In the film, Lily Bloom gives birth to her child, and Baldoni forced the actress, a four-time mother in the city, to watch a video of his own wife’s birth to encourage her to strip a little more during the film. scene, shot moreover without the respect of a small crew and in the unnecessary presence of co-producer, Jamey Heath. The actor-director also criticizes him for his weight and unknowingly approaches his sports coach to ensure that he will help him lose weight.
Uplifting contract
The agreement appears to remedy past excesses. It also included a clause prohibiting any retaliation for the criticisms made by the actress. The clause was not respected, far from it. According to an article from New York Times published the day after the complaint, Baldoni, seeing with anguish the film’s release date approaching and media attention mounting, secretly requested the services of a crisis communications pro, Melissa Nathan, known in Hollywood for having ravaged Amber Heard’s reputation and credibility during the defamation lawsuit brought against her by her ex-partner Johnny Depp in response to her accusations of domestic violence.
Here again, the contract is edifying. It includes the provision of a crisis team twenty-four hours a day, various “social manipulation”, the “dissemination of threads of theories”, “attaching the greatest importance to their untraceability”. Jennifer Abel, a regular communicator for Wayfarer, proposes to spread in the press and on the Internet a narrative attributing to Blake Lively basely mercantile intentions, such as that of assuming full powers over the production of the film by denigrating the actor-director. Baldoni, according to the complaint, wants to go further, and demands an offensive that “would allow him to feel better protected”. The exchange of messages between Nathan and Abel then outlines a cold strategy of destroying the adversary. “If he wants to bury it, destroy it, we cannot leave the slightest written trace, says Melissa Nathan. But we can bury anyone.”
The shot offers a choice of angles of attack: Blake Lively misses the point on the real theme of the film, domestic violence; or she cynically seeks to adorn herself with feminism for her personal interests. She has a bad reputation in the film crew; her methods are brutal… She’s not that nice. So many “strong points” distilled drop by drop, between two glances or overheard text messages, to the swarm of entertainment journalists looking for a cookie on the film. The pace picks up at the release of Never again. The press is unaware that the entire film team unsubscribed from the actor’s social network accounts to express their dissatisfaction with his attitude during filming. Without understanding that the actor-director is persona non grata at promotional events, the media believe that he has created a tailor-made mission, that of promoting the very painful theme of violence inflicted on women.
Hollywood hell
Behind the scenes, Melissa Nathan also contacted Jed Wallace, boss of Street Relations, a Texan agency specializing in public relations campaigns. “all terrain”, broken in the art ofastroturfingthe dissemination through armies of trolls or influencers of rumors specific to “define a personality or an actor” and designed to appear as spontaneous comments from Internet users. Videos of eight-year-old interviews, deemed unflattering for Blake Lively, are leaking from the account of a Swedish journalist in Hollywood. THE Daily Mail puts the actress through the rolling mill, listing her supposed blunders and reproaching her even for the location of her wedding in 2012, in a former southern plantation too linked to the history of slavery, while Nathan and Abel congratulate themselves on the carnage, real, inflicted on his reputation on social networks.
Blake Lively’s complaint, accompanied by dozens of copies of messages from communicators, creates astonishment and remorse in the media. THE Guardian apologizes for falling for his negative comments about the actress Never again. In Puck, columnist Matthew Belloni casts the film’s female communicators as villains of the year, blaming a public relations industry recycled into bloody, populated guerrilla warfare “political operators ready to destroy if the price is paid.” It also evokes the vulnerability of today’s stars, a “celebrity industrial complex” whose fortune, often ephemeral, depends more than ever on branding personal and qualities that are difficult to define as “public image, good intentions and, for some, talent”.
Justin Beloni, for all answer, chose to continue… the New York Times in defamation for having published Blake Lively’s complaint without verifying the accusations and is demanding 250 million dollars (242 million euros) in compensation. His anger also stems from a detail: one of the editors of the article, Megan Twohey, is the co-author of the investigation which revealed the accusations of rape and sexual assault against Harvey Weistein in 2017. Blake Lively, she , responds with a new lawsuit in a New York federal court, this time arguing illegal retaliation committed by his on-screen partner. The affair of Never again will perhaps one day become a hectic and lucrative legal series. In the meantime, it says a lot about Hollywood rosewater and its ruthless universe.
