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It Ends With Us” star Justin Baldoni hopes romance movie can create change: “We need to end the cycle
The highly anticipated movie “It Ends With Us,” which is an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s popular novel, is putting a spotlight on domestic violence.
The movie follows a florist named Lily, played by Blake Lively, who’s chasing her dream to open up her own shop. Co-star and director Justin Baldoni plays Ryle, a neurosurgeon who seems like a nice guy, but turns abusive. Baldoni didn’t intend on casting himself in the movie, but it was an email from Hoover that encouraged him to take on the role of Ryle.
“I was looking for movies that could be commercial and speak to the human experience,” he said. “I had never read a romance novel. By the end of the book, I couldn’t even read the text on the page because I was crying so much.”
Baldoni said Hoover’s novel — which sold 6 million copies — was inspired by her mother, who had a similar real-life experience as someone who endured domestic abuse.
“She was Lily Bloom and I just thought if this could affect me in this way then I could only imagine what it could do for women and people who are in this situation all over the world,” he said. “All of us have a situation or a pattern that we need to end the cycle of.”
He hopes the movie helps to create change. Too often, Baldoni said, people ask “why did she stay?” in regards to a woman in an abusive relationship, whether it’s in real life or in a book or movie.
“We need to be asking ourselves, why do men harm? And that was the big thing for me, and what I learned more and more and more of is these women who experience this every single day, there’s real love there. There’s charm. There’s charisma. There’s passion. There’s this belief they can be better, and it’s not so simple.”
He worked with an organization called No More that is dedicated to ending domestic and sexual violence, with the goal of creating an honest reflection of what women experience.
Baldoni hopes “It Ends With Us,” which premiered Tuesday, helps to create a safer world through compassion and empathy. He said he wants men to go see the romance movie and take accountability in their lives after watching it.
“I want men to go to the theater and in some ways see a version of themselves. You have two very different characters. Both of them in Atlas and Ryle have had past trauma,” he said. “One handles it very different than the other and my other hope is the men who have not done the work, who have not done the work to heal, if they see bits of themselves in Ryle, have a chance to step back and say, ‘You know what, I don’t want to blow up my life. I don’t want to hurt the person i love the most.'”
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill Saturday that would have required new cars to beep at drivers if they exceed the speed limit in an effort to reduce traffic deaths.
California would have become the first to require such systems for all new cars, trucks and buses sold in the state starting in 2030. The bill would have mandated that vehicles beep at drivers when they exceed the speed limit by at least 10 mph.
The European Union has passed similar legislation to encourage drivers to slow down. California’s proposal would have provided exceptions for emergency vehicles, motorcycles and motorized scooters.
In explaining his veto, Newsom said federal law already dictates vehicle safety standards and adding California-specific requirements would create a patchwork of regulations.
The National Highway Traffic Safety “is also actively evaluating intelligent speed assistance systems, and imposing state-level mandates at this time risks disrupting these ongoing federal assessments,” the Democratic governor said.
Opponents, including automotive groups and the state Chamber of Commerce, said such regulations should be decided by the federal government, which earlier this year established new requirements for automatic emergency braking to curb traffic deaths. Republican lawmakers also said the proposal could make cars more expensive and distract drivers.
The legislation would have likely impacted all new car sales in the U.S., since the California market is so large that car manufacturers would likely just make all of their vehicles comply.
California often throws that weight around to influence national and even international policy. The state has set its own emission standards for cars for decades, rules that more than a dozen other states have also adopted. And when California announced it would eventually ban the sale of new gas-powered cars, major automakers soon followed with their own announcement to phase out fossil-fuel vehicles.
Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener, who sponsored the bill, called the veto disappointing and a setback for street safety.
“California should have led on this crisis as Wisconsin did in passing the first seatbelt mandate in 1961,” Wiener said in a statement. “Instead, this veto resigns Californians to a completely unnecessary risk of fatality.”
The speeding alert technology, known as intelligent speed assistance, uses GPS to compare a vehicle’s pace with a dataset of posted limits. If the car is at least 10 mph over, the system emits a single, brief, visual and audio alert.
The proposal would have required the state to maintain a list of posted speed limits, and it’s likely that those would not include local roads or recent changes in speed limits, resulting in conflicts.
The technology has been used in the U.S. and Europe for years. Starting in July, the European Union will require all new cars to have the technology, although drivers would be able to turn it off. At least 18 manufacturers including Ford, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Nissan, have already offered some form of speed limiters on some models sold in America, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 10% of all car crashes reported to police in 2021 were related to speeding. This was especially a problem in California, where 35% of traffic fatalities were speeding-related — the second highest in the country, according to a legislative analysis of the proposal.
Last year the NTSB recommended federal regulators require all new cars to alert drivers when they speed. Their recommendation came after a crash in January 2022, when a man with a history of speeding violations ran a red light at more than 100 mph and struck a minivan, killing himself and eight other people.
