Scarlett Johansson did not meet Justin Baldoni, the co-founder of the production company Wayfarer Studios which produces her next film “Eleanor the Great” but admits that the moment of the creative partnership of her and Baldoni is strange.
Johansson told Vanity Fair in an interview published Wednesday that she and Baldoni had not had the chance to meet because of her crowded calendar which turns “IT ends with us”, the centerpiece of his current legal battle with his Costar Blake Lively. Nevertheless, Johansson said that Wayfarer was only a useful collaborator all the time in the middle of the Baldoni legal drama.
“They were super favorable throughout the process,” said Johansson about Baldoni. “But yes, such a strange timing.”
In December 2024, Lively filed a complaint for sexual harassment against Baldoni, saying that the filmmaker provoked her “serious emotional distress” and coordinated a campaign of smear against her after having proven himself with her allegations. Baldoni retaliated with a counter-combination against Lively, Reynolds, their publicist and the New York Times for $ 400 million on what he called “falsified stories”. (He abandoned his separate defamation trial of 250 million dollars against the NYT, and rather modified the reconvention request above to include the document.)
“Eleanor The Great” by Johansson, his beginnings as a director, tells the story of a woman who involuntarily joins a group of Holocaust survivors who plunges her into memories that her friend told her about the experiences she endured in Poland occupied by Nazi. The film should make its first at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival in the coming weeks.
