It seems actress Blake Lively is figuring out just how hard it is to be a parent.

The “Gossip Girl” alum is mother to four children that she shares with her husband Ryan Reynolds: James, born in 2014, Inez, born in 2016, Betty, born in 2019, and Olin, born in 2023.

In a 2016 interview, Lively joked about her daughter playing with explosives, sticking them in a dog’s ear, and putting holes in her drywall. Although it was seen as a joke at the time, her comments are being viewed in a new light following the sexual harassment lawsuit that she filed against her “It Ends With Us” costar and director, Justin Baldoni.

Blake Lively was probably joking when she said her kids were playing with explosive devices, but her comments are being viewed in a new light following her “It Ends With Us” lawsuit. At the time, Lively was pregnant with the couple’s second child when she appeared on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” in 2016.

She joked that her daughter, James, who was only one-and-a-half years old, was fully equipped to be a babysitter so that she and the “Deadpool” star could still enjoy date nights. “I feel like at a year and a half, she’s equipped to be a babysitter,” Lively joked. “Like we can go out and do date night and we’ll be fine.”

She then compared herself to “perfect” moms that she sees on social media, saying that her daughter caused a lot more trouble around the house. “My kid is playing with explosive devices – I don’t know where she’s found them – sticking them in our dog’s ear,” she said. “She already knows how to drywall because she puts holes in the wall.”

She did not elaborate on what kind of “explosive devices” her daughter got her hands on, considering she was not even two years old at the time.

After the “Gossip Girl” alum accused him of sexual harassment and body shaming, Justin Baldoni’s legal team released a website where they posted allegedly unedited text messages showing his side of the story. Lively had accused the director of body shaming when he asked her personal trainer for details about how much she weighed.

In the court documents posted on his website, Baldoni claims that he only asked how much Lively weighed in order to pull off a “lift” sequence during a romantic point in the film. Baldoni reportedly has multiple bulging discs in his back and wanted to work with his own personal trainer in order to figure out how much he needed to lift.

Although Lively has claimed that the scene never existed and there was no lift sequence, Baldoni’s team has provided rehearsal footage and published script pages showing that a lift sequence was planned before it was ultimately scrapped.

Stating that she wasn’t content to only be an actress, Lively said, “I also knew that wasn’t fulfilling for me, that I wanted to be part of the storytelling, be a part of the narrative, whether that be in the writing, the costume design, creating the character.”

Instead, she claimed that she would trick directors into casting her in the role, and then speak up later. “When I was in the meetings, I was like, I’m just here to be the actor and I’m here to get the gig. I wouldn’t reveal that I needed to have authorship to feel fulfilled,” Lively explained.

“And I feel for them, it felt like a rug pull, and you’re trying to insert yourself into something we didn’t hire you to do,” she continued. “Sometimes I had the director, writers, producers who would welcome that once I was able to offer that, and sometimes I had people who resented that, because they just hired me to be the actor.”

“That’s called fraud,” Kelly said of Lively’s “secret” plan. “When you pretend you want to do the one thing and you’ll do the thing they’re hiring you for, but all along you have secret plans to do something very, very different that’s above your pay grade.”

“She finally bumped into someone who was weak enough and not famous enough to stop her. This Justin Baldoni, most people had never even heard of him — he’d been in, like, one series. He certainly wasn’t at Ryan Reynolds–level fame, never mind Blake Lively, and she bullied him into giving her the movie where she did her own cut,” she added.

Kelly went on to say that Lively was a “rather sh-tty person” and “absolutely ruined her own brand” by “starting a fight she cannot win.”

“I have yet to see one of her complaints borne out. In fact, all of the ones I’ve seen have been undermined by [Baldoni’s] hardcore proof in text messaging and so on that puts a totally different light on her horrific allegations,” Kelly said. “Then you see what she actually said and wrote. It’s very different.”

Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively’s “It Ends With Us” trial is currently scheduled for March 2026.