Blake Lively Bringing Fan-Favorite Novel To Life But Suffers Setback

Blake Lively has a reputation for playing characters that are not always so likable. And she does it with style, sass, and expertise. Indeed, she has become known as the pretty, untouchable woman after her turns in Gossip Girl, The Age of Adeline, and A Simple Favor. Even in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants she was the “hot girl” of the four.

Fortunately, fans of Lively’s have been able to catch her in interviews, and watch her adoring husband, fan favorite Ryan Gosling, go on and on about her in speech after speech.

So, fans of Blake Lively and of It Ends With Us must be thrilled to see how this casting works out. Colleen Hoover has become a star in her own right, with entire shelves in bookstores dedicated to the “CoHo” fan club. She is well-known for creating the sweet, innocent girl who falls in love with the wrong guy, or who and has to grow up and learn to navigate the real world.

Now fans will get to see how Lively, so used to cut-throat ruthless characters, will pull off Hoover’s sweetheart.

The movie Blake Lively will soon be making, It Ends With Us, is about a girl who grows up in an abusive household, witnessing her father repeatedly and violently beat her mother. As a teenager, Lily meets a homeless boy, Atlas, in an abandoned house behind her own, and the two become fast friends. We experience these encounters through Lily’s flashbacks. 

In the present day, she is a young entrepreneur hoping to open her own flower shop when she meets Ryle, a neurosurgeon who has a “no dating” policy, but relentlessly pursues Lily for sex. She resists because she wants a relationship. The two quickly fall into a head-over-heels relationship that turns violent. 

As Lily is trying to figure out what to do, she meets Atlas again after all this time, purely accidentally. Now, we have a love triangle laced with abuse, and while the choice may seem clear cut, it’s anything but. 

Justin Baldoni (the super hunk from Jane the Virgin) directs and stars as Ryle in the film, and Brandon Sklenar (the super hunk from Yellowstone spinoff 1923) plays Atlas. It will be hard to pick sides when we finally get to sit down in the theater and cry with Lily over the mess that is her life.

Many CoHo fans are not pleased with the casting as the characters in the book are supposed to be young adults and Blake Lively, Baldoni, and Sklenar are all in their thirties. But Colleen Hoover has responded to her fans by saying that the aging of her characters was her mistake — a mistake the adaptation corrects. “There’s not a 20-something neurosurgeon.” 

In any event, fans of Blake Lively and the book It Ends With Us are excited. We’re also hopeful that this movie will do well so we can look forward to a sequel, a film adaptation of the second book, It Starts With Us.