Hello and welcome to Gossip Time, a weekly guide to the stars by Allie Jones. This week: an actress promotes a movie, an actor finds a new model, and Leo DiCaprio gets stung by a jellyfish.
No one promotes a movie like Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. The couple just got done talking up Reynolds’s passion project/$200 million Marvel movie Deadpool vs. Wolverine — a press tour that involved long, only partially intelligible Instagram praise from Lively, matching outfits with Gigi Hadid, ticket promo from Taylor Swift, and Reynolds’s premiere-night reveal of the couple’s fourth baby’s name (Olin). Now, Reynolds and Lively have turned their attention to It Ends With Us, the Colleen Hoover adaptation that stars Lively as Lily Bloom, a flower shop owner who escapes an abusive relationship.
Lively has been throwing everything at the wall for this one: She launched a haircare line, styled herself in approximately 478,000 floral outfits for every stop on the press tour, and sat for a puzzling Vogue cover shoot directed by Baz Luhrmann with Reynolds’s co-star Hugh Jackman. As the movie opens this weekend, however, everyone is mostly ignoring all that in favor of finding out what’s up with Lively and her co-star and director Justin Baldoni, who plays her character’s abusive husband in the film.
TikTok sleuths are convinced that Lively and Baldoni had some kind of major falling out in the leadup to the premiere and that Hoover and most of the cast have taken Lively’s side.
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The evidence: Lively and Baldoni have not interacted during the press tour at all. Lively did not take any photos with Baldoni at the premiere, and neither did most of the rest of the cast. Lively and Hoover reportedly unfollowed Baldoni on Instagram. And then there’s this, from co-star Jenny Slate:
The feud, if there is one, seems to be a result of creative differences. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Lively, who was an executive producer on the film, ordered a new cut of the movie from Deadpool editor Shane Reid sometime during post-production. She also revealed on the red carpet this week that Reynolds “wrote” one of the big scenes in the movie.
“The iconic rooftop scene, my husband actually wrote it,” Lively told E! News. “Nobody knows that, but you now. He works on everything I do. I work on everything he does. So his wins, his celebrations are mine and mine are his.”
Reynolds is not credited on the film and neither is Reid. So it’s unclear how much of the couple’s (surely superior) creative direction made it into the final cut of the movie. For his part, Baldoni suggested that he would not want to direct the sequel, if there is one. “I think that there are better people for that one,” he told a red-carpet reporter at the premiere. “I think Blake Lively's ready to direct, that’s what I think.”
I’d love to see it!
Lively’s onetime boyfriend Leonardo DiCaprio got stung by a jellyfish in Sardinia this week. He’s okay, though.
Our favorite 49-year-old bachelor has been yachting around the Mediterranean with his current 26-year-old Italian model girlfriend Vittoria Ceretti. Also in tow: longtime Pussy Posse lieutenants Lukas Haas and Tobey Maguire and newer friends like British Vogue editor Edward Enninful (he put DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone on the cover last fall to promote Killers of the Flower Moon). It looks like everyone is having fun, especially Maguire, who has a new model girlfriend named Babette Strijbos.
She is — take a guess — 24. Which of course is much older than 20. You may recall that last month, Maguire was criticized online for walking out of Michael Rubin’s Fourth of July party with the 20-year-old actress Lily Chee, and that his ex-wife Jen Meyer defended him on Instagram, telling commenters that Maguire was simply helping a “friend” to her car.
Now we can see that Meyer was right: Maguire, 49, has standards. Women 23 and under are friends, and women 24 and up are girlfriends. Pretty simple.
STUFF BY HILARY DUFF: This week I learned that Hilary Duff still posts semi-regularly on Facebook, where she has 12 million followers.
Finally, I’ll leave you with this photo of Zoë Kravitz and Channing Tatum at the premiere of Kravitz’s directorial debut Blink Twice last night:
Kravitz, 35, called Tatum, 44, the “love of her life” during her speech at the premiere. Aww. I hope Tatum finally settles his divorce from Jenna Dewan so we can see a Kravitz-Tatum wedding.
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I feel kind of bad for the actual screenwriter that Blake is claiming that her husband rewrote scenes, possibly without being asked?
According to a World of Reel report, Baldoni's cut scored higher with test audiences, so who knows what's going in here
https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2024/8/8/it-ends-with-us-director-fought-with-blake-lively-over-final-cut