OK, Fine, I Will Be the One to Defend Blake Lively (2025)

I am a hipster of finding Blake Lively annoying: I swear I was doing it before it was cool. Remember when she got married on a plantation? When she started that website where she swooned over the antebellum South? When she captioned an Instagram photo of herself with the words “L.A. face with an Oakland booty” a few years ago? I wish I could forget.

So you might think I’d be pleased by recent developments in the Blake Lively sphere—namely, the emergence of a seeming groundswell of people who also claim to have had it up to here with the actress. Alas, I am not. I’m suspicious of you late arrivals to the Blake Lively hate train. To be quite honest, you’re going a little too hard for my liking. I’m as surprised as anyone to be defending—or more accurately, semi-defending—this person that I’ve never had any special affection for, but please allow me to explain.

This all started last week, in the run-up to the release of It Ends With Us, the movie based on a Colleen Hoover novel that Lively stars in, produced, and has been tirelessly promoting for what feels like years but has probably more accurately only been weeks. Social media chatter began to surface indicating that there might be some kind of schism between Lively and the rest of the cast, and Justin Baldoni, the movie’s director and co-lead, based less on any real reporting and more on the kind of internet detective work fans have become accustomed to pursuing on their own: Observers noticed that many cast members weren’t following Baldoni on Instagram and that they didn’t appear in photos together at the premiere. Is there any truth to the rumors of a feud? The Hollywood Reporter reported that there may have been a bit of a battle over the movie’s final cut, and TMZ and Page Six have both published reports about on-set tensions, including some instances of Baldoni reportedly making Lively uncomfortable.

For anyone saying this is the sequel to the Don’t Worry Darling drama they’ve been praying for: Pray harder. Need I remind you that that scandal had a juicy leaked video of Olivia Wilde begging original star Shia LaBeouf to stay in the movie and the baked-in excitement of a star (Harry Styles, who replaced LaBeouf) who was dating the director, not to mention a viral moment at a film festival that had us all trying to decipher whether someone got spit on? It Ends With Us has fed us mere scraps in comparison.

Probably because the It Ends With Us situation has failed to produce such footage or any real material, the topic has become Lively herself, and suddenly there’s a race to enumerate her many sins. As Vox has recounted, Lively is being criticized for using the It Ends With Us press tour to promote her side businesses and for not treating the film’s theme of domestic violence with sufficient seriousness. This has provided an opening for past criticisms of Lively to reemerge. In addition to her aforementioned wedding and clumsy lifestyle website, one particular interview from 2016 has been in heavy rotation on social media: In it, a journalist congratulates Lively on her baby bump, and Lively appears to rudely return the congratulations, even though the journalist is not pregnant.

Many of these criticisms are valid—Lively does seem like a terror in that old clip! So why is this conversation so annoying? A lot of it is that this all feels like a dogpile, and a whiplash-inducing overreaction. Out of nowhere, there were some clips where Jenny Slate (who has a supporting role in IEWU) gave an indirect answer on a red carpet, so now everyone thinks there’s a feud, but … swerve, there is no feud, Lively’s the villain instead? Can’t we make a little room for the possibility that Baldoni might also suck? Yeah, maybe it wasn’t the best idea for Lively to tell us to wear florals to her movie about abuse like it’s the sequel to Barbie, but people are acting like her implying the movie is anything less than a dour public service announcement is inappropriate. Newsflash: It’s a movie, and much like Barbie, it’s a good one to see with girlfriends. Did she really do anything so bad? Yes, she’s annoying, but we need celebrities to be a certain amount of annoying for us to have anything to talk about and for the economy to function. Can’t we just leave it there without it turning into a moral crusade?

The more I think about, the more it feels like Blake Lively has been “woman’d,” the writer Rayne Fisher-Quann’s term for when “everyone stops liking a woman at the same time.” Notice how it happened on a much smaller scale with Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, recently—his new Deadpool movie inspired some tweets and at least one piece about how Reynolds is annoying, but it didn’t feel like a discussion that took over the entire internet and several news cycles the way this Lively discussion has. People really do love to hate a woman! And so the more tweets I read hating on her, the more up in arms I get, because it all feels like too much.

Is it actually too much, or does it only feel that way as a function of social media? Last year, the New York Times Magazine made the point, in an essay about Twitter that I would extrapolate to apply to social media at large, that the service “can produce enormous outcomes without meaningful inputs.” This means that maybe everyone is only mildly annoyed by Lively, but in aggregate, their mild annoyance feels like a tidal wave. Blake Lively does not warrant a full tidal wave. And another strange thing about the virtual-hate tidal wave is that it doesn’t seem to be negatively impacting her movie’s success: The movie surpassed $100 million at the box office in a week. Does that mean no one in the real world cares about any of this? Or does it mean this could even be helping the movie? Those questions I will leave to people smarter than I am. In the meantime, all I’m asking is that you take a moment and recalibrate your Blake Lively feelings. It’s fine to feel whatever way you want to about her, as long as you don’t feel it too strongly. Remember that this is a ridiculous movie about a florist named Lily Bloom who wears ridiculous clothes and has ridiculous hair, take a deep breath, and take it down a notch.