Times Taylor Swift Was Mentioned In It Ends With Us Promo
On Friday, it was revealed that Taylor Swift is officially being subpoenaed as a witness in the ongoing legal case between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively in relation to their 2024 movie, It Ends With Us. Both Justin and Blake starred in the film, with Justin also the director.
If you need reminding, Blake filed a complaint against Justin with the California Civil Rights Department on Dec. 20, accusing him of sexual harassment on the movie's set, and coordinating a smear campaign to damage her reputation. The next day, The New York Times published a story supporting Blake's allegations about Justin's PR team deliberately setting out to paint her in a bad light, and Justin was dropped by his agency. Then, on Dec. 31, Blake filed a lawsuit suing Justin, his production company Wayfarer, and his PR representatives Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel. However, that same day, Justin announced that he is suing The New York Times for $250 million for its Dec. 21 article. On Jan. 16, Justin filed a countersuit against both Blake and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, requesting $400 million in damages and alleging defamation, civil extortion, breach of contract, and more.
Justin has vehemently denied the sexual harassment claims, and on Feb. 1, Justin's legal team launched a website that puts all of his correspondence with Blake throughout the production and filming of It Ends With Us on public display. The evidence provided on this website put Blake's allegations in a whole new light for some, with Justin's team alleging that she essentially took over the production of It Ends With Us, and enlisted both Ryan and her best friend Taylor in a bid to make Justin bend to her whim.
In one alleged text from Blake that Justin's team put forward as evidence, Blake references the HBO series Game of Thrones as she brands herself a 'Khaleesi' and seemingly hints at Ryan and Taylor being her 'dragons.'
'If you ever get around to watching Game Of Thrones, you'll appreciate that I'm Khaleesi,' her alleged text to Justin reads. 'And like her, I happen to have a few dragons. For better or worse, but usually for better. Because my dragons also protect those I fight for. So really, we all benefit from those gorgeous monsters of mine. You will too, I can promise you.'
In another exchange, Justin references Ryan and Taylor being present at a meeting he had with Blake, writing in a text to his costar: 'I really love what you did. It really does help a lot. Makes it so much more fun and interesting. (And I would have felt that way without Ryan and Taylor).'
However, a representative for Taylor has now denied that the music superstar had any involvement in It Ends With Us outside of licensing her song "My Tears Ricochet" for use in a trailer and scene from the film. They also claimed that Justin's team only subpoenaed her for 'tabloid clickbait.'
In a statement to People, Taylor's spokesperson said: 'Taylor Swift never set foot on the set of this movie, she was not involved in any casting or creative decisions, she did not score the film, she never saw an edit or made any notes on the film, she did not even see It Ends With Us until weeks after its public release, and was traveling around the globe during 2023 and 2024 headlining the biggest tour in history."'The connection Taylor had to this film was permitting the use of one song, 'My Tears Ricochet,'' the statement went on. 'Given that her involvement was licensing a song for the film, which 19 other artists also did, this document subpoena is designed to use Taylor Swift's name to draw public interest by creating tabloid clickbait instead of focusing on the facts of the case."
However, it's worth noting that the texts used in Justin's evidence are far from the first time that Taylor's name was mentioned in association with It Ends With Us, with there being multiple instances of the cast referencing the singer during their promo tour.
Blake reiterated this during an interview on CBS Mornings, when host Gayle King asked her about whether Taylor volunteered her song for inclusion in the film, or if Blake had asked. Side-stepping the question somewhat, Blake said: 'She was with me throughout this whole process. I think, for better or worse, she experienced the whole thing with me.'
And directly contradicting Taylor's rep's comment about the star not being involved in any casting decisions, actor Isabela Ferrer said that Taylor was instrumental in landing her role in It Ends With Us, with Isabela playing the younger version of Blake's character, Lily Bloom.
Justin confirmed this in an interview with Access Hollywood, where the reporter said to him: '[Isabela] told me Taylor Swift helped her get the role signed off, on her audition tape,' and Justin replied: 'I was casting, and I had actually brought in and showed her casting tape to Blake and Taylor, and they were both like: 'Yes, her,' that's a true story.'
Discussing Taylor's involvement in her being cast, Isabela added to Extra: 'I don't even know if I'm meant to be saying it, but yeah, she was a helpful part of the process, of the audition. I found out later, after I got it, and that rocks my world. I have no words.'
Blake even included a 'special thanks' to Taylor in the end credits of the film.
Interestingly, Taylor did not promote It Ends With Us on her social media pages when it was released, even though she is no stranger to plugging her friends' projects to her fans; including Ryan's movie Deadpool & Wolverine, which was released at around the same time.
She has not publicly commented on any of the drama surrounding the film or the subsequent legal cases, and Lively v Wayfarer Studios is set to go to trial in March 2026.
Let me know your thoughts on the whole thing in the comments below.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Insider
3 hours ago
- Business Insider
Miley Cyrus says getting older changed how she sees her parents
For Miley Cyrus, adulthood means seeing her parents not as her mom and dad, but as individuals outside their parent-child relationship. In an interview with The New York Times published on Saturday, the "Flowers" singer spoke about growing up in the public eye and as part of a famous Hollywood family. Rumors of a Cyrus family feud have swirled since her parents, Billy Ray Cyrus and Tish Cyrus-Purcell, finalized their divorce in 2022. When asked if she was still estranged from her father, she told the Times, "No. I think timing is everything." "As I've gotten older, I'm r especting my parents as individuals instead of as parents — because my mom's really loved my dad for her whole life, and I think being married to someone in the music industry and not being a part of it is obviously really hard," Cyrus said. Her parents were married for almost 30 years before they officially called it quits. They previously filed for divorce in 2010 and 2013, but reconciled both times. Her mother married "Prison Break" star Dominic Purcell in 2023. Her father married Australian singer, Firerose, in 2024, but they divorced just seven months later. Since April, he has been in a relationship with Elizabeth Hurley. Cyrus says she's made peace with the fact that her parents have moved on to having relationships with other people. "But now that my mom is so in love with my stepdad, who I completely adore, and now that my dad, I see him finding happiness, too — I can love them both as individuals instead of as a parental pairing," she said. "I'm being an adult about it. At first it's hard, because the little kid in you reacts before the adult in you can go, 'Yes, that's your dad, but that's just another person that deserves to be in his bliss and to be happy.' My child self has caught up," Cyrus added. In the interview, the " Hannah Montana" star also spoke about learning to rely less on her mother. Instead, she now imagines what her mom would do in uncomfortable situations and tries to mirror it. "And now I just go, 'What was it about her that made everything better?' It was safety, because I knew any situation that I didn't feel safe in, my mom would get me out of it or make it better. And so now I just imagine what soothed me about her, and then I do it for myself," she said. Cyrus isn't the only celebrity who has spoken about navigating the changing parent-child relations in their lives. In a 2024 appearance on "Today with Hoda and Jenna," Molly Shannon said parents should see their teens as "regular people" and have more empathy. "Most of the time, they just want to be heard. I try to think of that," Shannon said. A representative for Cyrus did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular hours.
10 hours ago
Miley Cyrus speaks out about dad Billy Ray's romance with Elizabeth Hurley
Miley Cyrus is sharing her thoughts on her dad, Billy Ray Cyrus ' new relationship and reflecting on how their own bond has evolved. In a new interview with The New York Times published Saturday, the Grammy winner spoke candidly about Billy Ray's romance with actress Elizabeth Hurley, as well as her mom Tish Cyrus' marriage to actor Dominic Purcell. "Now that my mom is so in love with my stepdad, who I completely adore, and now that my dad, I see him finding happiness, too -- I can love them both as individuals instead of as a parental pairing," Miley told the outlet. "I'm being an adult about it." She continued, "At first it's hard, because the little kid in you reacts before the adult in you can go, 'Yes, that's your dad, but that's just another person that deserves to be in his bliss and to be happy.' My child self has caught up." Billy Ray and Tish Cyrus, who tied the knot in 1993, divorced in 2022 after nearly 30 years of marriage. They share three children -- Miley, Braison, and Noah -- and Billy Ray also adopted Tish's two older children, Brandi and Trace. Billy Ray went public with his relationship with Hurley on Easter Sunday. Their debut as a couple came just months after he finalized his divorce from his second wife, Firerose, in August 2024, according to People. In her New York Times interview, Miley also addressed longstanding speculation about her relationship with her father. When asked if they were estranged, she simply replied, "No." "I think timing is everything," she explained. "As I've gotten older, I'm respecting my parents as individuals instead of as parents -- because my mom really loved my dad for her whole life, and I think being married to someone in the music industry and not being a part of it is obviously really hard. And so I think I took on some of my mom's hurt as my own because it hurt her more than it hurt me as an adult, and so I owned a lot of her pain." Her comments followed a rare family photo that Billy Ray shared earlier this month, showing the family reunited to celebrate Braison's 31st birthday -- a moment that came after months of rumors about a rift between the father and daughter. Miley also directly addressed those rumors in a statement shared to her Instagram stories on May 10. "My dad and I have had our challenges over the years," she wrote at the time, per E! News. "Now, in my thirties, family is my priority above all else. I'm at peace knowing bridges have been built and time has done a lot of healing. Grateful for the good health and love that flows through my family." Billy Ray echoed those sentiments in his own Mother's Day post on Instagram, praising his daughter and the progress they've made. "I'm so proud of Miley and her guts and her courage... her wisdom and strength to bring it when our family needed it most," he wrote. "We are so close to a full healing."
Boston Globe
13 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Lynn Freed, South African writer with a wry style, dies at 79
'If Joan Didion and Fran Lebowitz had a literary love child, she would be Lynn Freed,' critic E. Ce Miller wrote in Bustle magazine, describing Dr. Freed's writing as 'in equal turns funny, wise and sardonic.' Advertisement Raised by eccentric thespians in South Africa, Dr. Freed immigrated to New York City in the late 1960s to attend graduate school and later settled in California. Her first novel, 'Heart Change' (1982), was about a doctor who has an affair with her daughter's music teacher. It was a critical and commercial dud. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Dr. Freed caught her literary wind in 1986 with her second novel, 'Home Ground,' which drew generously on her upbringing. Narrated by Ruth Frank, a Jewish girl whose parents run a theater and employ servants, the book subtly skewers the manners and lavish excesses of white families during apartheid. 'Here's a rarity: a novel about childhood and adolescence that never lapses into self-pity, that rings true in every emotion and incident, that regards adults sympathetically if unsparingly, that deals with serious thematic material, and that is quite deliciously funny,' Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post wrote in his review. 'It is also the flip side of rites-of-passage literary tradition, for its narrator is not a boy but a girl.' Advertisement Writing in The New York Times Book Review, novelist Janette Turner Hospital praised the novel's keen point of view. 'Lynn Freed's guileless child-narrator takes us inside the neurosis of South Africa,' she wrote. 'We experience it in a way that is qualitatively different from watching the most graphic of news clips.' Dr. Freed returned to Ruth Frank in 'The Bungalow' (1993). Now it's the 1970s, and Ruth is married and living in California. After separating from her husband, she returns to South Africa to care for her dying father. Staying in a seaside bungalow owned by a former lover, she confronts past loves and past lives in a country that is, like her, in transition. In 'The Mirror' (1997), she told the story of Agnes La Grange, a 17-year-old English girl who immigrates to South Africa in 1920 to work as a housekeeper for a wealthy Jewish family and eventually finds her way into bed with her employer. 'The qualities with which Freed endows her heroine are fundamentally masculine, and through this comes a subtle but inescapable feminist message which makes 'The Mirror' more than a colonial family saga,' Isobel Montgomery wrote in her review for the British newspaper The Guardian. Lynn Ruth Freed was born on July 18, 1945, in Durban, South Africa. Her parents, Harold and Anne (Moshal) Freed, ran a theater company. They were certainly characters. Advertisement 'As childhoods go, it would be hard to imagine a better one for a writer,' Holly Brubach wrote in the Times, reviewing Dr. Freed's essay collection 'Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home' (2005). 'The youngest of three girls, Freed was born into a family presided over by a histrionic mother and a debonair father.' She graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, in 1966. She moved to New York City the next year to study English literature at Columbia University, where she earned a master's degree in 1968 and a doctorate in 1972. Her books sold well, but they were never blockbusters. In 2002, she won the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award for fiction, among the most prestigious of literary prizes. She also won two O. Henry Awards for her short stories. In interviews, she was often asked how much of her fiction was autobiographical. 'When I am writing properly -- which, I might say, comprises only a fraction of my writing time -- I tend to disappear into the fiction,' Dr. Freed said in an interview with Sarah Anne Johnson for the 2006 book 'The Very Telling: Conversations With American Writers.' 'What is the difference between remembered experience and imagined experience? I don't know.' Dr. Freed's marriage to Gordon Gamsu in 1968 ended in divorce. Her second husband, Robert Kerwin, died in 2021. In addition to her daughter, Jessica, she leaves two stepchildren, Fiona Zecca and Killian Kerwin; a granddaughter; and four step-grandchildren. For many years, Dr. Freed taught writing at the University of California Davis. She was also a frequent -- and popular -- guest at writers' colonies. Friends said her readings were always packed. 'She was beautiful, and she was fun to be around,' writer Philip Lopate, a close friend, said in an interview. 'Her voice on the page was the same as she was in person. Her writing gave pleasure, just as she did in real life.' Advertisement This article originally appeared in
