Justin Baldoni’s lawyer claims Ryan Reynolds based ‘Deadpool and Wolverine’ on ‘It Ends With Us’ star
In a new development to Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively’s legal battle, Baldoni’s lawyer has alleged Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, based a character in the blockbuster Deadpool and Wolverine on his client.
In the film, Reynolds’ fourth wall-breaking superhero meets an alternate version of himself called ‘Nicepool’, who has his hair in a topknot and seemingly uses faux-positivity to hide a darker undercurrent. The character references another variant of Deadpool called ‘Ladypool’, played by Lively, and quips, “She is gorgeous. She just had a baby, too, and you can’t even tell.” When Deadpool responds, “I don’t think you can say that,” Nicepool hits him with the punchline, “That’s okay, I identify as a feminist.”
Many fans speculated at the time that Nicepool may have been a veiled potshot at Baldoni, and now his lawyer, Bryan Freedman, has stated that he and his client certainly believe it was. Freedman appeared on The Megyn Kelly Show and launched a defence of Baldoni, arguing that Nicepool actually proves his client isn’t guilty of the serious offences he’s been accused of.
Freedman said, “What I make of that, is that if your wife is sexually harassed, you don’t make fun of Justin Baldoni. There’s no question it relates to Justin. I mean, anybody that watched that hair bun — if somebody is seriously sexually harassed, you don’t make fun of it. It’s a serious issue.”
In December 2024, Lively filed a lawsuit against her It Ends With Us co-star/director Baldoni, accusing him of sexual harassment and “a carefully crafted, coordinated, and resourced retaliatory scheme to silence her.”
On December 20th, The New York Times published an article entitled “We Can Bury Anyone: Inside A Hollywood Smear Machine”, which included texts between Baldoni and his PR team referencing Lively. Baldoni’s legal representatives soon filed a countersuit against the newspaper and Lively, arguing that the outlet “cherry-picked and altered communications stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead.”
In response to the situation, Baldoni, who denies any wrongdoing, was quickly dropped by his agency WME, while Lively has been supported by a flurry of stars, including Colleen Hoover, the author of the source novel It Ends With Us.
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