Justin Baldoni Suffered ‘Near Breakdown’ While Making ‘It Ends With Us’

Working on It Ends With Us proved to be a surprisingly challenging process for Justin Baldoni. Baldoni, who had a dual role as actor and director of the project, said recently that it was a strenuous task. 

“Directing is a very lonely job, I’ll just be very candid, because you are kind of at the top of this totem pole,” Justin said on the How to Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast Dec. 4. “In your moments of quiet, everybody has a thousand questions for you and also nobody wants to disturb you. And you don’t really have many people to talk to and you can’t necessarily share your anxiety or your nervousness about something because you’re also the leader.”

It was also emotionally daunting starring as Ryle Kincaid—the abusive husband of Blake Lively’s character Lily Bloom. He admitted that he almost had a breakdown while filming.

“It’s a very strange place to be, let alone directing while trying to play a character who does the things that Ryle does in the movie,” he added. “There were moments in the filming of this where I would just have to leave. I’d have to remove myself and go shake it out. I mean, I’ve done a lot of somatic therapy so there were times when I was actually just shaking.”

“There’s a moment in the movie where Ryle finds Lily’s phone,” Baldoni continued, “and he finds a phone number and he’s very jealous and he’s heartbroken and he’s angry. And he doesn’t harm her, but you can see in his eyes how dangerous he is. After that scene, I had a near breakdown.”

Baldoni remembers taking a break to deal with his emotions. “And I had to leave and just cry and shake because there was so much pain,” he said. 

It took him four months to disconnect from the character after filming. He tried hard to understand his character beyond the violence. “What he does is a result of what he has kept in and so what’s hard about having that in your body is having the trauma live in your body of what he’s experienced or creating that trauma in your body,” he shared. “And creating that insecurity and the pain and the feeling that you shouldn’t actually be alive.”

The film is currently available to stream on Netflix.