Justin Baldoni Is Redefining Masculinity as He Enters His Leading Man Era With ‘It Ends With Us’

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Not that you can tell he’s been sick. In Variety’s L.A. photo studio, he leaps into the air and clicks his heels for the camera as an AJR song booms in the background. It’s only when greeting him that one notices: Before leaning in for a bear hug, he adjusts the tubes protruding from IV ports on his arm. He’s recovering from a weeklong hospital stay at St. John’s, still fighting off a nasty infection that he doesn’t want to talk about.

Vulnerability doesn’t always come easily. Indeed, that’s what Baldoni’s new film is all about. Baldoni, who played the reformed playboy Rafael Solano on The CW’s hit series “Jane the Virgin,” has directed himself in his first role since that show ended in 2019. In Sony’s film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s megahit novel “It Ends With Us,” Blake Lively plays a florist named Lily and Baldoni plays Ryle, a seemingly kind neurosurgeon who turns out to be an abuser.

It’s a major departure for a hunky leading man best known for romancing Gina Rodriguez on a weekly basis, and who went viral as an outspoken feminist in a December 2017 TED Talk. Back then — only months after the surfacing of assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein kicked off the #MeToo movement — Baldoni asked men in the audience, “Are you brave enough to be vulnerable? Are you strong enough to be sensitive?”

He’s since become an internet guru of sorts, advocating, on his popular podcast “Man Enough,” for men to take an active role in dismantling patriarchal norms. In the weekly show, Baldoni facilitates discussions on how men can lean into their emotions, from getting therapy to having a good cry.

Which means that playing the part of a love bomber who eventually reveals himself to be violent made for a scary departure. Baldoni initially read the book with an eye to producing it through his Wayfarer Studios shingle; Baldoni’s book agent referred the novel to him in 2019, when it had already sold a million copies. “It was sexy, and it was romantic and mysterious,” he recalls. “By the end, I was sobbing real snot tears.”

“I was very protective of this book,” Hoover says, adding that she rejected several offers before Baldoni’s. “But then I got an email from Justin that was really heartfelt, and I felt like he understood the book and he understood the importance of people needing to see it on-screen.” Hoover sent a spontaneous email to Baldoni during the optioning process: “Have you ever thought about acting in this?” she said. “Maybe playing Ryle? I could see it.”

Baldoni, who previously directed CBS Films’ “Five Feet Apart” and Disney’s “Clouds,” had been moving away from acting — and this was a character he was afraid to play. And that turned out to be the appeal. “I wanted to try, because it scared the hell out of me,” he says.

Baldoni’s not shy about his feelings. He’s the kind of guy you’d trust to watch your drink at a bar — which, in a strange way, is what makes him the right choice for Ryle.

“You need someone in the role of Ryle where it’s going to hurt when you see them not turning out how you wish they could be,” Hoover says. “With Justin, who just is a truly kind person, playing that role, it was honestly perfect.”

The internet wasn’t as sold as Hoover was, though. When Lively and Baldoni were announced as the leads, die-hard fans of the book raised eyebrows at the actors’ ages. In the novel, Lily is 23 and Ryle is 30 — a far cry from Lively and Baldoni, who were in their mid-30s at the time of filming.

But the decision to age up the characters was Hoover’s. Part of it was the 15 or more years it takes to become a neurosurgeon. And part of it was working to depict a victim of abuse as a woman who’s aged out of naivete — to make the case that this could happen to anyone. Says Baldoni, “It would help us in seeing a woman who has had life experience, who’s been in relationships before, who has the means to start a venture like a flower shop, fall for a guy like Ryle.”

He adds that Lively’s casting underscores the ways abuse can affect even those people you least expect it to. Suddenly, the smooth speaker from the TED stage grows halting, trying to find the right words. “I want to be careful how I say this,” he says. “I’ve heard people say, ‘Why wouldn’t you just leave? Why would she stay?’ We know that abuse happens to women of all ages. But it also happens to powerful women. It happens to very strong women. It happens to affluent women.”

Baldoni has written on the subject before: His two books are 2021’s “Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity” and the 2022 children’s guidebook “Boys Will Be Human,” which aims to help boys ages 11 and up embrace their fearsn instead of repressing them. But he also knew to look beyond himself for help: Wayfarer Studios asked the nonprofit organization No More, dedicated to ending domestic violence and sexual assault, to take an advisory role during the development and production of “It Ends With Us.” Baldoni and Lively also worked with both an intimacy and a stunt coordinator when filming their scenes of domestic violence.

“What was important for me was that the abuse come from Ryle’s insecurity — from a deep feeling that he wasn’t enough,” Baldoni explains. “Showing that allows the movie to not have an archvillain. He’s not this mustache-twirling bad guy; he’s a guy with deep pain and deep trauma who makes terrible decisions that are never acceptable or excusable in any situation.”

While the movie clearly targets a female demographic, Baldoni says he wants men to see it. “My hope was that this is a film that could help somebody who was on the path to becoming a Ryle. That’s why I didn’t want to show him as this angry villain from the beginning; I wanted to be more subversive and slow with it,” he says. “Trauma doesn’t discriminate. And men are also victims of domestic violence.”

At Wayfarer, Baldoni has a slew of projects in the works that are sure to become equally hot topics, including Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, “Eleanor the Great,” and a live-action film adaptation of “Pac-Man.” Will Ferrell’s Sundance darling “Will & Harper,” a documentary about the comedian connecting with a close friend who came out as trans, will be distributed by Netflix later this year.

And another “It Ends With Us” film isn’t out of the question. After all, the book has a sequel. “I mean, we have the option on it,” Baldoni says. “I haven’t even begun to think that far ahead. I’m trying to stay in the present as much as I can.”

He practices what he preaches: Shortly after our interview, he’s getting on a plane to spend the summer celebrating his wife Emily’s 40th birthday in Sweden with their kids, Maiya, 9, and Maxwell, 7. Even as Baldoni stands on the precipice of a major career shift with the release of “It Ends With Us,” his priorities are clear. “I just took my daughter to get her ears pierced,” he says. “I want what I do to have meaning. Yet I don’t want it to overtake me and become everything, because I don’t want to blink and miss my children’s childhoods.” He sighs. “Those are the two opposing forces that are happening right now in my life.”

There’s no question of which force is winning. “The truth is, nobody is going to read my IMDb at my funeral,” he says with a laugh. “Moments come and go. I’m disposable to Hollywood; there’ll be a million Justins or people that look like me at some point in time.”

But perhaps this film will have an impact beyond his own fortunes. “If a Lily walks into that theater and she watches this movie,” he says, “will she go home and make a different choice? That’s exciting to me.”