Kate Beckinsale is standing behind Blake Lively during the latter’s revelatory complaint against It Ends With Us co-star Justin Baldoni and his team of cunning public relations agents. The English actress shared experiences from her career which mirror those Lively has detailed in court documents, including getting called a “c–t” after speaking up against a drunk cast mate.
Beckinsale took to Instagram to comment on the case after clarifying she doesn’t know either party but has first-hand experience with the “machine that goes into effect when a woman complains about something legitimately offensive, upsetting, harmful … in this industry.” The 51-year-old actress, who had her breakout into Hollywood in the late ’90s, listed a several episodes where she was disrespected and abused on movie and photoshoot sets, only for her worries to be discarded and buried by those in charge.
“I’ve been gaslight, blamed, and ostracized”
One of those instances came when Beckinsale expressed concern and frustration over a male co-star who would show up intoxicated and late to set every day. The actress says she was referred to by “that c–t” and “you stupid b—h,” implying that the insults came from her unnamed problematic scene partner. “I’m waiting, as is the whole crew, six hours a day for him to learn his lines, and it means I’m not getting to see my daughter in the evenings, ever, for the whole movie,” she recounted. The studio responded by giving her a bicycle to ride around the studio to pass the time.
In the nearly five-minute-long video, Beckinsale talked about being made to feel ugly by makeup crews and being put on diets so strict she stopped menstruating. On filming “unsafe” fight sequences in two different films, the actress claimed there are certain actors who get a “thrill out of legally being able to harm a woman.” When she reported injuries stemming from those experiences, “she was gaslight, blamed, ostracized, left out of cast dinners, and not spoken to.” Once, Beckinsale says, a publicist forced her to participate in a photo shoot the day after she suffered a miscarriage and while she was still bleeding, under threats of being sued.
Besides being blacklisted by Harvey Weinstein after turning down a film, the Total Recall action star was also “felt up” by a crew member she “really trusted” when she was just 18 and getting her start. When she told both the lead actress and another female cast member, they disregarded her, telling her the incident hadn’t happened.
Beckinsale finished the video by thanking Lively for “highlighting the fact that this is not an archaic problem that no one’s facing,” that “this is continuing, and then when it does happen, a machine goes into place to absolutely destroy you.”
Blake Lively accused Justin Baldoni of orchestrating a PR strategy to tarnish her reputation after on-set disagreements
In a complaint filed in December, Lively accused Baldoni of hiring the crisis PR team the Agency Group — famous for handling Johnny Depp’s public image during his defamation trial with Amber Heard in 2022 — to “bury” her after she called out the director and actor’s on-set behavior. Among other things, the 37-year-old actress claims to have made complaints about Baldoni improvising “physical intimacy that had not been rehearsed, choreographed, or discussed.”
The suit also includes screen captures of alleged text exchanges between publicists obtained through subpoena, wherein they revel in the online response to seeds they had planted. Lively’s reputation plunged during the press tour for It Ends With Us, when the public noticed she wasn’t joining her director and co-star for interviews. Moments where the actress appeared dismissive of the film’s serious domestic violence-related themes went viral, along with old clips of Lively being rude to an interviewer. Within days, the entire internet had turned against a once massively popular celebrity.
Like Beckinsale notes in the caption of her post, the new generation of women in the public eye have it “even worse because of social media and how that can be weaponized to a literally nuclear level, designed to eviscerate.”