The supporting characters in Another Simple Favor, the psycho-drama comedy sequel that’s streaming now on Prime Video, don’t know what to do with themselves in the presence of Blake Lively. Dressed in a parade of rhinestone-studded, overly accessorised ensembles (one look involves dungarees, multiple earrings and a bowler hat), Lively’s character Emily Nelson – a schemer, murderess and secret triplet who’s offed at least one of her sisters – draws gasps and mild panic every time she enters a room.
Lively’s work, from the soaring melodrama The Age of Adaline to last year’s cursed weepie It Ends with Us, tends to be maximalist like this. Everything goes big: the hair, the costumes, the ripple effect of her mere presence in a movie. It was Emily’s sudden disappearance in 2018’s A Simple Favor that transformed Anna Kendrick’s anxious mommy blogger into a citizen detective, and it’s Emily’s shock return – and the mystery dead body that turns up soon after – that kickstart its sequel. But even for a star of her magnitude, Lively feels too big for Another Simple Favor. Arriving amid the messy legal battle between Lively and Justin Baldoni, the director and leading man of It Ends with Us, the new sequel gets sucked into the vortex of completely unrelated off-camera drama. You leave it pondering if every future Blake Lively role will follow suit.
Another Simple Favor was shot in Capri, Italy, last spring. Back then, no one had even seen It Ends with Us, let alone been able to anticipate how it’d spectacularly implode upon release in August. Following months of speculation of a feud between Lively and Baldoni, Lively alleged in December that she had been made the target of an elaborate smear campaign orchestrated by Baldoni and his PR team after she reported sexual harassment and workplace safety concerns on the It Ends with Us set. Baldoni, while denying the allegations, sued Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds for extortion, defamation and invasion of privacy, alleging that Lively made false complaints in order to gain creative control over It Ends with Us, before forcing him out of the filmmaking process and later the movie’s promotion. As of writing, both lawsuits, as well as a separate lawsuit Baldoni has filed against The New York Times, which first reported Lively’s allegations, remain in play.
The unusually scant press tour for Another Simple Favor has been collateral damage in the Lively/Baldoni war. Lively’s online detractors, coupled with self-styled “body language experts” on TikTok and Instagram, have – based on little more than vibes – claimed to detect an animosity between Lively and Kendrick. The film’s director, Paul Feig, was forced to deny an entirely fictitious viral claim that the movie was to be scrapped due to Lively’s apparent unpopularity. On Thursday, Lively began her single late-night talk show appearance to promote the movie by acknowledging her “intense year”. “I see so many women around afraid to speak, especially right now, afraid to show their experiences,” she told Seth Meyers. “And fear is by design. It’s what keeps us silent.” She said she is in the midst of a fight “for the world to be safer for women and girls”.
However the lawsuits shake out when they go to trial in 2026, Baldoni’s career has been destabilised – he was dropped by his agents after Lively’s allegations went public, lost work and his presenting role on a feminist podcast, and has little industry power or goodwill beyond a small if loud contingent of supporters. Lively’s future career is more of a question mark. She has no confirmed acting jobs on the horizon, and has spent at least the last decade of her fame attempting to mount side hustles, from a short-lived, Goop-style lifestyle site called Preserve, to her own brands of gin and haircare. Acting seems to have been less of a priority.
And it’s this that may ultimately decide where she goes from here. There is no real analogue in modern Hollywood for the drama surrounding Lively and Baldoni, which seems to be fuelled less by personal conflict than a scorched-earth creative tussle. It’s not Johnny Depp versus Amber Heard, though the volatility of the internet machine exploiting it for clicks is similar. The closest comparison may be the experiences of Kim Basinger, who was immersed in a litany of financial and professional scandals in the early Nineties that for years eclipsed her actual film career.
In 1993, Basinger was sued for breaching an oral agreement to star in the erotic thriller Boxing Helena, with the film’s producer claiming that Basinger “damaged my picture and my life”. A prolonged court battle ensued, and a jury eventually ordered her to pay $8.1m in damages, which forced her into bankruptcy. An appeal was launched in 1994, before Basinger agreed to settle for $3.8m. Around the same time, Basinger and her then-husband Alec Baldwin faced a raft of bad press amid claims of mutually poor behaviour on the set of their doomed comedy film The Marrying Man (1991) – he was accused of throwing constant tantrums, she of holding up filming by spending hours in her trailer bathing in sour cream and milk. She later described the period as “open season on me”, her “persona … blown up in all these proportions that even I myself would say I have no idea who that is”. She was speaking in 1997, after a three-year hiatus from movies, and promoting LA Confidential, which would win her a best supporting actress Oscar.
Basinger’s break from acting allowed the heat around her to die down. It’s different now, of course – the pre-internet age meant that your average man on the street likely didn’t know about the Boxing Helena lawsuit and the shockwaves it sent through the industry back then. But that Basinger stepped away, then returned in a role that pocketed her one of Hollywood’s greatest honours, is proof that sometimes the best way to survive scandal is silence. Another Simple Favor is only coloured by the bad luck of its release date. If it came out six months ago, or was even delayed to next year, you likely wouldn’t find yourself wincing at Lively’s character threatening someone with the line: “I will sue you into oblivion”. Coming on the heels of months of dramatic Lively discourse, her presence here feels slightly wearying.
The thing about Basinger in the Nineties, though, is that she still wanted to act. A bigger question for Lively may be whether she does too. In one text out of hundreds of exchanges between the actor and Baldoni that his legal team published online in January, she was transparent about her creative restlessness. She describes being “hired as a writer [for a past film] and paid a significant fee for it but on the condition that I never ask for credit”. She mentioned another instance, too, in which she was misled about having her voice valued on a set, only to discover later on that she was “just wanted as a ‘yes man’ audience and actor”. They echo comments she made at a Forbes magazine event in 2022, in which she described being unfulfilled by being hired exclusively as an actor on films, and her wish to be involved in “the writing, the costume design and in creating the character.” She continued: “I don’t want to just be an actor, I want to have more authorship.”
It wouldn’t be too surprising if Lively got the authorship she’s been looking for on the set of Another Simple Favor – Feig has long had productive relationships with his female actors, among them Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig, and has spoken highly of Lively. And Emily undeniably feels like her creation: a big-haired, outrageously outfitted glamazon who sparks as much wonder as she does envy and aggravation. For better and worse, it is the ultimate Blake Lively role. If it’s her last for a while, even better.
‘Another Simple Favor’ is streaming on Prime Video
