This lawsuit still has surprises.
Photo: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images
What is the female gaze, and who possesses it? That’s not for me to answer but It Ends With Us producer, director, and star Justin Baldoni, who had to wade through the mines of feminist language in a deposition back in October. Though we’re still four months out from the never-ending It Ends With Us drama finally going to trial, a handful of new documents have been unsealed in the ongoing case between his Wayfarer Studios and co-star Blake Lively. The biggest revelation from this latest update: Baldoni told her he is circumcised before they even started working together.
Why were these people on the topic? Well, allegedly when Baldoni met with a then–“very pregnant” (his words) Lively to convince her to do the film, they discussed whether or not she would circumcise her fourth child. In the process, he told his soon-to-be co-worker (along with her husband, Ryan Reynolds, and a handful of other staff in the room) that he himself was circumcised. “Did Ms. Lively ask you whether you were circumcised?” her lawyer Michael J. Gottlieb asked Baldoni, to which the latter responded, “Directly, no.” Not only does this imply there is an indirect way to ask, but it also reveals that perhaps this movie shoot was going to be troubled before it even began.
All we have to go off of is Baldoni and his PR team’s deposition, with Lively’s still sealed up, but the line of questioning mostly focuses on the extent to which the director and actor framed his reputation in the industry around being a male ally to women. Despite repeated insistence that things in the film were framed around the “female gaze” (something Baldoni defines as something inherent to anyone who is female), Baldoni came under pressure from both Lively and another co-star, Jenny Slate, for his language in the script and on set. In the first pass of the script, Baldoni included a sex scene in which Lily climaxes and Ryle does not — which he believed would be “attractive” to the female gaze — but according to his testimony, Lively argued against including it, saying she would be “mortified” if that happened to her in real life. Baldoni pushed back by citing an example from his own sex life.
Later, Baldoni says he managed to step in it again by telling Slate that she looked “sexy” in a pair of pants the costume department provided her with for a party scene. Slate allegedly asked Baldoni if he would change his language in an interaction he mostly described as lighthearted. “I don’t have the exact words,” he explained. “It’s like we are staying away from using those words to describe, you know, women’s bodies.” Gottlieb followed up by asking if her “objection to describing her wardrobe as sexy would constitute her female gaze on that particular situation” and whether Baldoni had “a different gaze” from his “male perspective.” “I don’t know if it’s possible that I can have a different gaze as a male,” Baldoni said in response. “So I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re asking,” Sometimes you think you’re going in for a routine deposition and you wind up doing Gender Studies 101.
What becomes clear throughout Baldoni’s deposition is that his self-promotion of himself as a “male ally” came back to bite him again and again as his behavior allegedly grew overly familiar, if not uneasy. Earlier in the deposition, Gottlieb asked Baldoni about the “culture of hugging” on the It Ends With Us set. When Baldoni learned that people were uncomfortable with the hugging, he said he put a stop to it, switching over to a culture of “high fives” and verbal compliments. Even at its most tame, whatever happened on that set always sounds like the worst work retreat of all time.
