Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni had ‘genuine affection’ while filming ‘It Ends With Us,’ intimacy coordinator says

A Hollywood intimacy coordinator believes Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni had “genuine affection” while filming “It Ends With Us.”

Mia Schachter, who is not affiliated with the movie, weighed in on the co-stars’ on-set feud, which is at the center of their dueling lawsuits, in the new documentary “He Said, She Said: Blake Lively vs Justin Baldoni.”

“From reading their text messages, I do get the sense that, at one point, there was genuine affection between them and what felt like a friendship,” Schachter opined in the TV special, which aired Monday in the UK (via Us Weekly).

The texts included jokes that were, at times, seemingly flirty in nature.

In her December 2024 lawsuit, Lively, 37, accused Baldoni — who also directed the film — of sexually harassing her during production. She alleged he improvised kissing scenes and tried to add additional sex scenes beyond those in the script. She also claimed there was often no intimacy coordinator on set.

Baldoni, 41, denied Lively’s allegations in his January countersuit and provided a text message from her showing she declined to meet the movie’s intimacy coordinator before production began.

“In my experience, when an actor says, ‘I don’t need to meet the intimacy coordinator until we’re shooting,’ as much as it hinders my process, it does typically indicate that they trust their scene partner,” Schachter explained in the documentary.

“And those texts made me think that, at one point, she did feel a lot of trust with him.”

When dissecting the raw production footage that showed Lively and Baldoni filming a slow-dancing scene, Schachter appeared to side with the actress, who claimed she tried to avoid kissing the actor-director by suggesting they talk in the scene instead.

Baldoni interpreted the move as Lively “inserting herself into the production process in intrusive ways,” but Schachter doesn’t “see that.”

“I see an actress trying not to kiss her co-worker, and instead of saying, ‘I don’t want to do that,’ she’s making other suggestions,” she said.

Schachter called Lively’s perceived actions “pretty considerate,” noting that “it could be humiliating for everyone there to see Blake Lively tell Justin Baldoni, ‘Stop trying to kiss me.’”

Reps for Lively and Baldoni did not immediately respond to Page Six’s requests for comment.