Justin Baldoni says backlash over aging up It Ends With Us characters 'didn't really bother' him

Ever since Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni were revealed as the stars of the movie adaptation of It Ends With Us, some fans of Colleen Hoover's 2016 romance novel couldn't get over the age differences between the actors and their characters in the book. Lively, 36, is 13 years older than protagonist Lily, while Baldoni, 40, is 10 years older than his character Ryle. But Baldoni, who also directed the movie, never let the online backlash over aging up the characters get to him.

"When you have a book that is so in the zeitgeist, especially on a platform like TikTok and Instagram and social media, you're always going to have online chatter. There's always going to be opinions." Baldoni tells Entertainment Weekly.

"It didn't really bother me because the fact that they were talking about it was a beautiful thing," he adds. "If nobody talks about your book adaptation, then I feel like that's more of a problem. Then we should be worried."

It Ends With Us, the first of Hoover's books to be adapted for the big screen, centers on Lily, a woman who overcomes a traumatic childhood with an abusive father to begin a new life in Boston. Things seem to be on track as she follows her dreams to open her own flower shop, but when she falls in love with charming neurosurgeon Ryle, she begins to realize his abusive behavior only continues the harmful cycle she's been trying to escape her whole life. Their toxic love is further complicated when Lily's childhood love, Atlas (Brandon Sklenar), reappears in her life, upending everything she thought she knew and wanted.

Baldoni was so inspired when he first read the book that he immediately saw his vision for the movie adaptation, which required aging up the characters. "I just knew from the beginning the type of movie I wanted to make was not about a 23-year-old girl," he explains. "I wanted women of all ages to be able to see themselves, and aging up the characters, I think, really helps it become a universal story, and it takes it out of the YA genre. I believed, from the beginning, that Blake Lively is aspirational to young women and would never be seen as too old once they saw the movie."

Much of the book takes place in flashbacks as present-day Lily reads her high school diary, and Baldoni wanted to portray that visually with a younger actor — Isabela Ferrer — playing teen Lily in those scenes. As the director watched the online chatter about the age differences take off, he realized that the fans who were upset about the castings didn't know there was an important reason behind it.

"What got me excited about it was that nobody knew my plan for how I was going to show young Lily, and how important that was for me, and the extensive search I went on to find someone who looked and felt like a young Blake," he says. "And Isabela, who is just an incredible actress, this is her coming out party, and she nailed it. We did a TikTok search; we read so many people, and I kept that close to the vest because I want people to watch the movie and then be transported and not be thinking about that stuff."

That's why Baldoni never wanted Lively to play Lily at both ages — he didn't want to ask audiences to buy into believing Lively as a teenager and as an adult. He felt that "judging" while watching would take viewers out of the movie.

"I never wanted to be in a situation where I had Blake playing herself at a younger age because they're really two different people in the movie, and they're in two different situations, and two different places in their life," he explains. "As I was [developing] the script with Christy Hall, and we were talking about how to do this, for me, it was never a 26-year-old actress playing 17. It always had to be two different people because we're not the same person we were when we were 17. I wanted to explore that cinematically, and I think that helps visually."

Rather than taking the negative comments to heart, Baldoni thought it was "exciting" to see the conversations. "I was like, 'People are talking about it, and I can't wait for them to see what we actually do with it,'" he says.

He also points out how Hoover herself has admitted that Ryle's age in the book doesn't actually make sense with where he is in his medical career. "There were a lot of questions around it," he says. "Colleen even jokes that she didn't know the math of becoming a neurosurgeon: Ryle, in the book, in residency, would've been 35. He would've been very close to becoming a neurosurgeon, which really you become in your late 30's/early 40's."

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Aging Lily from her early 20s to her early 30s allowed the movie to give her more maturity while dealing with serious issues like abuse. "Having Lily have real agency and life experience, I just think all of that was important," Baldoni says. "And Colleen's gone on record saying she wanted to age up the characters from the beginning when she wrote the book, but at the time, the publisher was pushing her into the YA genre because that's what was selling. And she said Blake was her dream Lily, so it just all worked out."

Baldoni will never forget the moment he told Hoover that Lively was officially playing Lily in the movie. "I remember calling her and giving her that news, and she didn't believe me," he says with a laugh. "She was just so happy. And I just knew that once [Lively] took it on, all of that chatter would go away once people saw what we were doing and why. Because I really believe this is a career-best performance that she gives in this movie, and I think people are going to see a whole new side of her. She deserves every ounce of celebration and all the accolades for what she pulled off in this film."

It Ends With Us opens in theaters Aug. 9.