Justin Baldoni On 'Complex Personalities' Behind 'It Ends With Us ...

Justin Baldoni is mid bite into a frosting-smothered cinnamon roll, insisting everyone else in the room try some.  

“See, and people think I don’t eat carbs!” 

And he’s right; his buff, Hollywood-leading-man looks don’t suggest someone who would gleefully dive into carbs and sugar, let alone a combination of the two. There’s even a joke in his new movie, “It Ends With Us,” that his character, Ryle, must not indulge. 

“Blake wrote that line,” Baldoni shares immediately, referring to co-star Blake Lively. He adds that it was Lively’s assistant who first introduced him to cinnamon rolls from The Hive in Hoboken, New Jersey, where the film was partially shot.

But their approach to carbs is hardly the only thing Ryle and Baldoni, who also directed the feature film, differ on starkly. The legions of fans who made Colleen Hoover’s book of the same title a mega hit know that Ryle’s initially charming and romantic allure only obscures his dark and troubled interior — which leads to a physically abusive relationship with wife Lily (Lively).

Where Ryle is abrasive and impulsive, Baldoni is contemplative and introspective, taking deep breaths and long pauses before answering questions. While Ryle’s eyes turn an eerie black in some of the movie’s more intense scenes, Baldoni’s gaze is warm and inviting, making conversation with each person behind the scenes of his photo shoot and interview.

How did one transform into the other?

“I did a lot of work to prepare for Ryle, months and months and months, before we ever shot anything,” Baldoni, an executive producer on the movie with Hoover and others, shares with TODAY.com. “Besides working with acting coaches, I kept a journal as Ryle, and I wrote down in first person as if it was like a therapy assignment.”

Part of the preparation also entailed sitting in court-mandated recovery groups for perpetrators in hopes of breaking down their psychology.

“I needed to understand him. I didn’t have to like him, but I had to understand why he did the things that he did, and where he was coming from,” Baldoni shares.

“My work was feeling his insecurity,” he continues, “because everything he does in the movie comes from a lack of something: It comes from a fear of being left behind, a fear of not being enough, a fear of nobody truly loving him, because he’s unlovable, because he doesn’t love himself, because of what he’s done, but he doesn’t know that yet. I would come home and I was just ... I’d be a complete mess.”

I’d go in the corner and let it out and make sure nobody was looking at me, because I’m the filmmaker at the end of the day.”

Justin Baldoni On crying on set

“I’m a ‘best idea wins’ person, and I always have been, to a fault. Sometimes to a point where, at times, I think I’ve had people wonder if I know what I’m doing or if I have a point of view, because I’m so willing to have my vision changed. I don’t believe that inspiration or creativity comes through one person.”

This proved to be a balancing act to avoid having his voice drowned out entirely. “You don’t have to listen to everybody and that didn’t happen all the time, but there were just moments where I would get out of the way too much,” he says.

Other times, Baldoni was happy to step back, like when he asked the intimacy coordinator and stunt coordinator to take the lead in the sensitive scenes depicting domestic violence. He also deferred to input from domestic violence organization No More to make choices for the film.

“The last thing I wanted to do was have a male gaze penetrate these very important moments that need to be told in a truthful way, to represent all of the women that experience them every day,” he says.

He credits contributions by Lively, a producer on the movie, in particular as crucial to the film’s success.

“You can’t summarize Blake’s contribution in a sentence, because her energy and imprint is all over the movie and really, really made the film better, and from beginning to end. Ryan (Reynolds) was so generous ... he’s a creative genius, that guy. So, you know, his gift is levity, and her gift is levity.”

Would he work with the husband-and wife duo again? “If they’d have me.”

Ahead of the movie’s release, Baldoni thinks back to the flurry of emails and a “pen pal relationship” with novelist Hoover that led to his involvement in the first place. While he can’t remember the exact exchange that convinced Hoover to trust him as the filmmaker, he thinks it has something to do with his ability to write truthfully and sincerely.

“My job as a filmmaker was wanting to protect the original intention of the book, which, as we know, Colleen wrote in honor of her mother who experienced (abuse),” he says.

In a previous interview with TODAY’s Jenna Bush Hager, Hoover characterized her household, up until her mother left her father when she was 2, as “abusive.”

For the movie to work, and for Lily’s arc to work, Baldoni says, Ryle couldn’t be a two-dimensional villain.

“He has to be a complex, dynamic person,” he says. “The majority of women who fall in love with abusive men did not fall in love with them because they’re abusive. They fell in love with them because there was something to love. Because they’re charming, they’re funny, they’re charismatic. They’re shiny people. They make them feel amazing. They love bomb.”

While the book and movie are, of course, meant to be entertainment, Baldoni says there’s more to them. He points back to the cinnamon bun to illustrate his point. Yes, there’s frosting, he says — “but that substance isn’t the frosting.”

“The book has that, right? But yet underneath, the message is the most important thing. That’s why she wrote the book.”

As this yearslong project comes to a close and the movie hits theaters Aug. 9, he says his mission is clear: “I was always thinking about the outcome and the why, and the one woman I was making this for who would sit in that theater and maybe not go back to her abusive relationship.”

Emily Sher

Senior Parents Editor