Comedian Zack Peter speculates whether Blake Lively caught "feelings" for Justin Baldoni while filming It Ends With Us

Comedian Zack Peter took to the internet with new speculations involving the growing controversy surrounding It Ends With Us stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. In December 2024, Blake Lively filed a complaint against Baldoni, accusing him of s*xual harassment and spearheading a smear campaign to ruin her reputation.

However, Peter claimed there might be another angle to the controversy in a new video posted on X on January 5. The comedian alleged that Blake Lively might have caught "feelings" for Baldoni during the shooting, which supposedly prompted her husband Ryan Reynolds to insert himself into production and alter some scenes in the script.

Peter also referenced the controversy surrounding Ryan Reynold's divorce from Scarlett Johansson, which many believed happened because Reynolds cheated on the Marvel actress with Lively.

"Did Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni catch feelings for each other? Hear me out. This whole thing is just so deep and so messy that there has to be a piece of it that we're not getting. Because there are all the rumors about Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds secretly having an affair while he was married to Scarlett Johansson and she was dating Penn Badgley.

"Could this be why Ryan Reynolds was so involved and had to "berate" Justin Baldoni in front of the executives?" Peter said in the video.

Zack Peter supported his hypothesis by claiming Lively and Baldoni had "intense" on-screen chemistry in It Ends With Us. He also claimed this could be a smoking gun for Baldoni's legal team.

"They do have really intense chemistry. Maybe Ryan Reynolds saw something, maybe he was picking up on something. Maybe that's why he wanted to be so involved to the point where he was re-writing some of their intimate scenes.

"Maybe Blake Lively did catch feelings, maybe that's why Baldoni's legal team is like, "Oh just wait until we release all the text messages." Just maybe they have a smoking gun somewhere. I don't know but it sounds plausible," Peter said.

Zack Peter's video received over 220K views at the time of this article.

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Justin Beldoni to sue Blake Lively following her harassment complaint

According to The Guardian, Justin Baldoni plans to sue Blake Lively after the actress accused him of s*xual harassment and fostering a hostile work environment. In an NBC interview on January 3, Bryan Freedman, Baldoni's attorney, said he was ready to publicly release the myriad of messages to prove Baldoni's innocence.

“I am more than willing to take every single text message that exists out there, lay them out, put them on a website for the world to see, have them see the truth and determine the truth for themselves," Freedman said.

This came after Baldoni's legal team sued The New York Times for $250 million for their story covering Lively's complaint in December 2024. The publication was the first mainstream media house to break the story to the public. In his lawsuit, Baldoni claimed that the Times "cherry-picked" the text messages published in the article to benefit Lively's "self-serving narrative."

For the unversed, The Times included several text messages allegedly between Baldoni, his publicist Jennifer Abel, and crisis PR manager Melissa Nathan. The messages allegedly discussed wanting to "bury" Lively with bad press during the movie's promotions.

According to People Magazine, Freedman claimed the messages detailed Baldoni's publicists' “internal scenario planning” to protect their client in case of any PR issues. The attorney also accused The Times of "using doctored and manipulated texts and intentionally omitting texts which dispute their chosen PR narrative."

“The Times story relied almost entirely on Lively’s unverified and self-serving narrative, lifting it nearly verbatim while disregarding an abundance of evidence that contradicted her claims and exposed her true motives,” the suit added.

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Other things mentioned in Justin Baldoni's lawsuit

On December 31, 2024, Justin Baldoni sued The New York Times for its Blake Lively story. The lawsuit alleged that the publication was bending to the whims of Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively, contradicting several incidents mentioned in the story. In her complaint, Blake Lively accused Baldoni of walking into her room while she was undressed and feeling her newborn baby.

However, Baldoni's suit claimed Lively invited the actor to her trailer with a message dated June 3, 2023, that read,

"I'm just pumping in my trailer if you wanna work out our lines."

Baldoni's suit also alleged that Ryan Reynolds "aggressively berated" him for allegedly fat-shaming Lively during an "all-hands" meeting in January 2024. The It Ends With Us director claimed the incident was "traumatic," adding that he had "never been spoken to like that in his life."

The suit also claimed that Blake Lively launched a smear campaign against Baldoni, causing him to hire a PR firm to protect himself. It also alleged that the actress did not want Baldoni at the film's New York City premiere on August 6.

During the premiere, Baldoni was "segregated" from the remaining cast, and there is no picture of Lively and Baldoni together on the red carpet, which initially spurned rumors of a falling out at the time.

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It Ends With Us, based on the Colleen Hoover book of the same name, was released on August 9, 2024. The movie follows the story of a florist (played by Blake Lively) and her troubling relationship with Ryle Kincaid (played by Justin Baldoni). Baldoni also directed and produced the movie, which is now available on Netflix.