Justin Baldoni has hired a crisis public relations manager amid reports of drama on the set of his film It Ends with Us.
On Tuesday, editors at People reported that the actor-director had employed PR industry veteran Melissa Nathan of The Agency Group to help him tackle rumours suggesting there was a rift between himself and his cast on the set of the new film.
Neither Baldoni nor Nathan has commented on the report.
In the lead-up to the release of the feature earlier this month, fans began to speculate that there was drama between Baldoni and his co-star Blake Lively after he didn’t pose with her on the red carpet at the New York City premiere.
He has also been absent from other promotional appearances featuring the rest of the cast, including the likes of Brandon Sklenar, Isabela Ferrer, and Jenny Slate.
In addition, Lively – who served as a producer on the project – recently revealed that her husband Ryan Reynolds wrote a key scene in It Ends with Us, which is based on a 2016 novel by Colleen Hoover.
“The iconic rooftop scene, my husband actually wrote it. Nobody knows that but you now,” she told E! News. “We help each other. He works on everything I do; I work on everything he does. So his wins, his celebrations are mine and mine are his.”
Meanwhile, Baldoni has responded to criticism that It Ends with Us glamorises domestic violence in a new interview for The Associated Press.
In the film, the actor portrays Ryle Kincaid, a surgeon who abuses his partner Lily Bloom, as played by Lively.
“I mean, look, we live in a culture where, unfortunately, too many things are glorified,” the 40-year-old told the outlet. “And we are fighting for attention – we are an attention economy, and we’re in a clickbait world and everybody is trying to figure out how to gather attention. Look at the news cycle, it’s everywhere around us. So, it makes perfect sense people would feel that way. Also, if anybody has had that real-life experience, I can imagine how hard it would be to imagine their experience being in a romance novel. To them, I would just offer that we were very intentional in the making of this movie.”
It Ends with Us, directed by Baldoni, is now in cinemas.
