Justin Baldoni Says ‘It Ends With Us’ Needed to Be Honest About Its Domestic Abuse: ‘Telling the Story in a Certain Way Is So Important’

The director and star tells TheWrap about working with nonprofit No More as a consultant for his more delicate scenes with Blake Lively

The post Justin Baldoni Says ‘It Ends With Us’ Needed to Be Honest About Its Domestic Abuse: ‘Telling the Story in a Certain Way Is So Important’ appeared first on TheWrap.

Spoiler alert: The following article contains frank discussion about the plot of “It Ends With Us.”

Justin Baldoni read Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends With Us” before the dark romance novel captivated BookTok readers at the beginning of the pandemic. He saw the potential for a film adaptation that could change lives, but he wasn’t sure if he was the person to do it. 

The filmmaker and founder of Wayfarer Studios optioned the book in 2019 for his production company before the hype, but he says he understood his own limitations as a man directing a female-driven romance-turned-domestic abuse drama.

“I know what I don’t know,” Baldoni told TheWrap. “No matter how much research, or how many women I talk to, or how much I try to empathize or even get into the mind and heart of my wife, I’ll never be able to understand what that experience is like. I knew that going in.”

Baldoni did not intend to star in the film, but he said it was Hoover’s early trust in him that gave him the confidence to lead the project.

“It Ends With Us” follows the emotional arc of Lily Bloom, an aspiring florist with a traumatic childhood. Lily (played by Blake Lively) falls in love with Ryle Kincaid (Baldoni), but their whirlwind romance turns into something darker than the fairytale she dreamed of.

The book and film centers around the topic of domestic violence. Lily witnessed her father abuse her mother throughout her childhood and as an adult finds herself falling into a similar dynamic. 

Baldoni told TheWrap that making this film without bearing the weight of the millions of D.V. victims around the world would be impossible. 

“The only way that I was going to be able to direct this movie was if I had the support that I needed to make sure that I could put myself in a position to get it right,” he said.  

That led to a consulting partnership with advocacy group No More. The nonprofit, which specializes in combating domestic and sexual violence, found that one in four women will experience severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime — a statistic that Hoover’s novel and Baldoni’s adaptation face head on. The org was on hand for early drafts of the script all the way through to filming scenes of intimate partner violence in the film. Wayfarer Studios then announced an official longterm partnership with the organization last December.

“Justin really wanted to know more of the details about intimate partner violence and wanted to make sure that he was representing it as accurately and sensitively as possible,” No More executive Toby Graff told TheWrap. “We didn’t want [the scenes depicting abuse] to be too difficult necessarily for an audience to see, but we also wanted them to be clear of what was going on.”

The nonprofit launched a site that houses resources for issues the film tackles specifically with hotlines, an outlet for people to share their own stories and survivor’s and viewer’s guides for more information after watching the film. 

“Leaning on No More in this situation was what gave me the freedom to direct this movie,” Baldoni said. “Not being worried about glorifying the violence or romanticizing abuse because I also was learning every day from the organization and from survivors about why this is so important and why telling the story in a certain way is so important.”

The director said that he had regular check-ins with the No More team throughout the process of shooting and finalizing the film and heard from survivors directly, which informed creative decisions he made. In the credits sequence, a link to resources from No More is directly available to audiences.

After going viral on TikTok, the novel “It Ends With Us” was scrutinized for being marketed as a sexy beach read about a love triangle when the actual subject matter dealt with darker issues of domestic violence. Though Hoover never marketed herself as a young adult author, parents also worried the book would be damaging to “impressionable young girls.”

“I didn’t shy away from any of the negative criticism of the book. If anything, I tried to understand it because I believe there’s truth there. I don’t believe that was the intention of the book at all, but I think it’s important to not just brush that off, but to understand what these survivors were talking about,” Baldoni reflected. “From the very beginning, it was so important that we didn’t romanticize.”

Baldoni added that it was important in his adaptation for audiences to not judge Lily for staying in the abusive relationship. He shows how in the first half of the film, she justifies instances of violence that were just grey enough to be reconsidered and excused. That’s why in the third act there’s a shift when the abuse can no longer be justified away. Reality catches up with the romantic fantasy Lily has created. 

“This relationship is officially abusive and unhealthy,” Baldoni said. “The audience knows it, and she knows it, and that’s when the movie shifts into a real story.”

Graff echoed that it is very common for abuse survivors to not acknowledge what they are experiencing in real time.

“The thing about being in a relationship that’s abusive is that oftentimes the abuse is not necessarily clear from the moment that it starts,” Graff added. “I think that Justin wanted to show that nuance of why it is complicated because it’s complicated oftentimes because there’s love at the core of the relationship, and so you think that it’s not necessarily abuse, or you don’t necessarily think that you’re in danger in that moment.”

At the end of the film, Lily delivers the love child of her and Ryle after a catastrophic last encounter between the two of them. After letting Ryle hold their baby girl and revealing that her namesake is his late brother, Lily rips the rug out from under him and says she wants a divorce. She decides to end the cycle of abuse there, a scene that Baldoni kept nearly verbatim to the original text. 

When asked how being a father in real life informed that scene, Baldoni said it made the stakes of protecting his baby girl real. 

“I was imagining what it would be like for Ryle in that moment, a guy who doesn’t actually think of himself as unsafe, even though he is, and the irony of wanting to keep this little girl safe. So for me as a father, what was helpful is being able to look at this little girl and re-experience what it was like when I got to hold my daughter,” he said. 

“But I wasn’t thinking, of course, about people like me. I was thinking about other people, which is really what these men think about. They don’t think of themselves as bad or as abusive. They think in some strange way that they are the victims. So in this situation, being able to hold this little girl and have this really beautiful moment — I’m a father just before the unimaginable happens. I could have never done that without being a parent.”

Though Baldoni wasn’t sure he was the right fit to lead “It Ends With Us” as director and star (a first for the filmmaker previously behind “Clouds” and “Five Feet Apart”), he told TheWrap his intention was to adapt “It Ends With Us” in the best, most authentic way he could.  

“My goal was always that if one person who’s in a situation like Lily walks into that theater and walks out choosing something different for herself like Lily, then we have succeeded,” he said.

“It Ends With Us” is now in theaters.

If you or someone you love is in need of help, reach the domestic violence hotline at 800.799.SAFE (7233) or text START to 88788. More film-specific domestic violence resources are available at NO MORE’s site.

A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Baldoni “did not intend to direct or even star in the film.” He always intended to direct the project.

The post Justin Baldoni Says ‘It Ends With Us’ Needed to Be Honest About Its Domestic Abuse: ‘Telling the Story in a Certain Way Is So Important’ appeared first on TheWrap.