Everyone knows the name “Blake Lively.” She is one of America’s sweethearts, until what I believe to be her true personality got exposed.
And don’t get me wrong, I loved her in “Gossip Girl,” and seeing her at her husband’s premieres, and was just as heartbroken when these things occurred.
Lively was a hit with teen girls as she was seen out and about with Taylor Swift, but as we can see has gained some backlash after starring the the movie, “It Ends With Us.”
This movie started as a book which already has some questionable background due to the author and the story itself.
People began to express that her book, published 6 years before this, “It Ends With Us,” romanticized domestic violence.
Lively took on the role of the main character Lily Bloom who is abused by her boyfriend Ryle Kincaid.
A review written by Michela Arlia with The Brooklyn College Vanguard in February of 2023 explains better than I can how the book is controversial.
“Early in Lily and Ryle’s relationship, Ryle begins to abuse Lily physically. A repetition of behaviors for her, Lily is stunned yet does not see the signs of her abuser. This is the first red flag,” says Arlia.
Not only is the content hard to digest, but her lack of acknowledgement of the topic is even harder to comprehend.
“To begin, the content warning in this book is very misleading in that it does not contain one at all. The explicitness in descriptions of abuse and other acts performed within the book are not known to the reader ahead of time, “ states Arila.
Hoover has a specific audience and she knows what to write to please them. That is shown by the fact that even after all of this, people are still supporting her.
To take away, Hoover has a very blatant insensitivity towards the topic of domestic violence.
Which is also seen in the movie.
Before we circle back to Lively, I don’t want to come off as discrediting any author or director who gave this topic the correct depiction, but when someone does it badly it needs to be addressed.
The actress handled the entire press tour incorrectly.
Lively constantly ignored the fact that the book and movie were about domestic violence and abused the fact that she is known for depthless movies.
She would go on camera and say things like, “Bring your girlfriends and wear your florals.”
Now in some ways maybe she could have been trying to bring lightheartedness to this gruesome topic, but -to me at least- it simply seems ignorant and uninformed.
I’m sure being in the public spotlight can be hard, but Lively has been in the spotlight for about 10 years and she is a grown adult who should know better.
Some people have tried to make excuses for Lively and others have just plain ignored it.
Although there is still a large group of people fighting to make her accountable.
Vogue Magazine’s Istagram posted a photo of Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds on Sep. 23 and the comments were not very happy with her.
The whole topic of her and this movie isn’t the only reason people are upset with her.
Because of this controversy, a video of her being very rude to an interviewer in 2016 has surfaced.
Prior to, the interview Lively had already publicly announced she was pregnant.
During the interview, Kjersti Flaa – the interview – congratulates her on her “little bump”.
And while any other human who has always been praised to be a great mother and seems to love being a mother, would take that as a complement.
Lively took this very differently as she threw the comment right back at Flaa with an aggressive tone.
Flaa didn’t release the footage of this interview until Lively started to get backlash for her approach to the press for “It Ends With Us,” which to me seems planned, but I won’t speculate too much on that.
No matter when Flaa released this interview, the fact is that Lively radiated mean-girl energy and knew she would get away with it.
She was also caught in a sort of one-sided feud with the director and her co-star Justin Baldoni who plays Ryle Kindcaid.
Lively and her husband were reported to completely take over Baldoni’s job, like rewriting entire scenes.
Myself and others, can agree that Lively has gone into very heavy damage control.
She released a haircare brand soon after the movie and yet we haven’t seen much advertising of her brand.
And everyone has already seen that she goes very hard on advertising as she did a very large amount of it for “It Ends With Us” especially on her Instagram.
She has gone pretty silent on her Instagram since her public image has been in a steady decline.
We can also assume that she’s seen the criticism and ignored it because her most recent post only lets limited people comment on it.
Why would an actress that’s publicly shown that she is huge on promotion suddenly stop if she didn’t know that she was wrong?
She has clearly decided that ignoring the fact that she is getting this backlash will make it go away.
This tactic, in most cases unfortunately works for celebrities as the next controversy comes along and sweeps everyone’s attention away.
That is one of the reasons I don’t like social media. It stops the process of holding people accountable.
At the end of the day, I simply want everyone to realize that celebrities aren’t always who they promote themselves to be.
If you dig a little deeper, you may find that America’s sweethearts aren’t all that sweet.
