Don’t mess with my wife! An ‘enraged’ Ryan Reynolds joins the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni stoush
Hollywood’s Mr Nice Guy has been accused of “berating” Blake Lively’s co-star Justin Baldoni, who in turn claims Ryan Reynolds accused a director of fat-shaming his wife.
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Ryan Reynolds is a man who has it all. The handsome star of Deadpool has professional success, four children and a beautiful wife, Blake Lively.
He has carefully curated an image as the A-lister next door, the Hollywood golden boy who bought a failing British football club, the actor with a very unluvvieish line in self-deprecating wit. What follows is a cautionary tale.
It’s what happens in a litigious society when famous people fall out. And it could probably be summed up in three words: “lawyers get rich”.
The trouble started on the set of Lively’s film It Ends with Us. Lively is suing Justin Baldoni, the director and her co-star, for sexual harassment and trying to “destroy” her reputation. Her husband has, according to Baldoni, accused the director of fat-shaming her. And now, with a lawsuit filed on New Year’s Eve, Baldoni is accusing her of a “vicious smear campaign”.
He is suing The New York Times, which first reported her claims, for libel and fraud. As for Reynolds, it turns out that, as well as publicly gatecrashing one of his wife’s promotional interviews for the film, he was also at a key meeting about its production.
A year ago, according to Baldoni’s legal papers, he and various other members of the crew were invited to Reynolds and Lively’s Tribeca home. Production of It Ends with Us had been derailed by the writers’ strikes, but was due to resume.
“They arrived eager to discuss plans for the next day’s filming,” it reads, “prepared with their production materials. Instead, they were blindsided by Lively and Reynolds, who presented a list of grievances that were both unanticipated and troubling.” In what Baldoni describes as a “traumatic” encounter, Reynolds, Baldoni alleges, launched into a “tirade”. He had, he complained “never been spoken to like that in his life”. Reynolds demanded an apology for Baldoni’s alleged behaviour to Lively. Baldoni refused. This led to Reynolds becoming “further enraged”.
A list of 30 “rules” for future behaviour on set, drawn up at that meeting, has now emerged. It includes a ban on showing nude videos or images of women to Lively, discussion of Baldoni’s previous “pornography addiction”, descriptions of genitalia, pressure by Baldoni on Lively regarding her religious beliefs, and pressure by Baldoni on her personal trainer to tell her how much she weighed.
Finally, there was to be a meeting between Baldoni, production staff, Lively and Reynolds “to confirm and approve a plan for implementation of the above that will be adhered to for the physical and emotional safety of BL … moving forward.”
For his part, Baldoni accuses Lively of “cynical abuse of sexual harassment allegations” to further her “brazen and calculated” aim of “expropriating” the film.
Now, as 2024 rolls into 2025, the lawyers and reputation managers are settling in for the lucrative long haul. And Reynolds is accused of being a bully.
He grew up in Vancouver, the youngest of four sons. His mother was a sales assistant, his father a policeman who made red wine in the basement and was prone to angry outbursts. Reynolds has said that as a child he would try to head them off by making sure the house was immaculate.
“I became this young, skin-covered micromanager,” he said, and referred to being “stressed out” as a child. When he was 13 casting directors arrived in Vancouver looking for actors in a new teen soap. He was cast as one of the leads and realised he’d found his calling. But he also realised that film sets could have a darker side. Some of the kids, he later said, “when they got it wrong, they would get belittled. I thought that was borderline abuse”.
Wiser but undeterred, he moved to Los Angeles aged 17, in 1997. After a year he got his break in a sitcom, Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, followed by a part as a frat boy in a film that became a cult classic: Van Wilder: Party Liaison.
He was named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 2010, while he was married to Scarlett Johansson. But they divorced after three years in 2011, a year after he met Lively on the set of Green Lantern.
They married in 2012 and welcomed their first daughter, James – named after his father – two years later. They bring up their four children between a house in upstate New York and a penthouse in Tribeca.
Reynolds spent lockdown mugging up on the history of Wrexham football club and watching old matches and, in 2021, paid pounds 2 million for the club, a move that baffled supporters, who thought he’d bought it as a joke, and his wife, who wondered why he’d spent pounds 2 million on a football club on the Welsh borders. The fans now sing “we’re f***ing rich” on the terraces.
The film that sent his career into the stratosphere was the 2016 blockbuster Deadpool. Made with a budget of less than $60 million, it grossed nearly $800 million worldwide. However, the film’s director, Tim Miller, exited stage left before work began on the second instalment, reportedly because Reynolds didn’t want the sequel to be a huge-budget production.
And behind the scenes, Reynolds admitted to The New York Times, he suffered from anxiety. “Both in the lighthearted ‘I’m anxious about this’ kind of thing, and I’ve been to the depths of the darker end of the spectrum, which is not fun.”
Back home, the couple socialise with Taylor Swift and Hugh Jackman and have been invited to state dinners at the White House. Their personal and professional lives have become intertwined, with Lively admitting that her husband wrote the rooftop scene in It Ends with Us without the screenwriter knowing about it.
And with hindsight the signs were there that Reynolds, one half of one of Hollywood’s longest and apparently most successful marriages, was not to be messed with. Miller described how, on the set of the first Deadpool, a paparazzo was trying to get pictures of Reynolds with his daughter James, then newborn.
“It was intense,” he recalled. “Ryan doesn’t f*** around … he wasn’t having it. Where his family are concerned, he’s protective.”
This article first appeared in The Times London
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Originally published as Don’t mess with my wife! An ‘enraged’ Ryan Reynolds joins the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni stoush
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