Ryan Reynolds

• 1. Introduction

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  Ryan Rodney Reynolds chose not to get paid for Deadpool to make sure the film would actually get made. That detail, small as it sounds, tells you almost everything about how Reynolds built one of the most unlikely careers in Hollywood. Here is a man who spent years cycling through romantic comedies, vampire hunters, and critically savaged superhero films before a wisecracking antihero in a red suit turned him into the world's second-highest-paid actor. How did a kid from Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood, expelled from school for stealing a teacher's car, end up with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a Welsh football club, and films that have grossed more than $6.6 billion worldwide? The answer is more complicated than a simple rise-to-stardom story, and stranger too.

• 2. A Vancouver Kid

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  James Chester Reynolds was a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman before he retired and became a foods wholesaler. His wife, Tamara Lee, worked in retail sales. Their youngest child, Ryan, was born on the 23rd of October 1976, in Vancouver, British Columbia, and grew up in the Kitsilano neighbourhood and later in Vanier, Ontario. Reynolds has described his three older brothers not as siblings but as something closer to a gauntlet. He called himself not a younger brother but a "moving target", unable to retaliate when the roughhousing got physical, though he later acknowledged that those same brothers protected him from their father, with whom he had a strained and complicated relationship.

  Reynolds's paternal grandfather, Chester, was a farmer who served as a member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta for Stettler between 1940 and 1944. Reynolds was raised Catholic and is of Irish descent. By thirteen he was taking acting classes, which he failed, and supplementing the effort with a day job as a busboy and night shifts at a local grocery store. The grocery co-workers stuck with him. He later described them as "the funniest people on Earth" and credited them as some of his biggest influences as a performer.

  At Prince of Wales Secondary School, things came unstuck. Reynolds attended grades nine and ten there before being expelled for stealing a teacher's car. He finished grades eleven and twelve at Kitsilano Secondary School alongside a classmate who would also go on to become an actor: Joshua Jackson. Reynolds graduated in 1994. He tried minor television roles, got discouraged, and at nineteen left acting entirely to enroll at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Then a fellow actor named Chris William Martin crossed his path, persuaded him to give it another try, and told him to move to Los Angeles.

• 3. The Long Apprenticeship

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  Hillside, a Canadian teen soap opera that Nickelodeon distributed in the United States under the title Fifteen, gave Reynolds his first lead role starting in 1991. He played Billy Simpson, a character who turned to bullying to mask family troubles and romantic rejection. His feature debut came in Ordinary Magic (1993), directed by Giles Walker, where he played Jeffrey, an orphan raised in India who goes on a hunger strike in a small Canadian town after drawing inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi. Variety's Paul Lenti found the film undermined by "facile characterizations and predictable plot development".

  The work that genuinely announced him was Two Guys and a Girl, the sitcom that ran from 1998 to 2001. He played medical student Michael "Berg" Bergen in a show that never matched its more celebrated contemporaries in ratings or reviews, yet Variety later noted in a retrospective that his "talent and charisma were apparent" and that his "star quality was already in place". In 2002, National Lampoon's Van Wilder gave Reynolds his first starring film role. Critics dismissed it; audiences kept coming back.

  In 2004, he trained six days a week and followed a 3,200-calorie diet to gain 11 kilograms of muscle in three months for his role as vampire hunter Hannibal King in Blade: Trinity. The film grossed $132 million on a $65 million budget but drew hostile reviews. Reynolds kept moving: romantic comedies, genre experiments, ensemble pieces. Adventureland (2009), in which he played a technician named Mike Connell, was later called by one outlet one of the most underrated performances of his career. For the survival thriller Buried (2010), he spent the film trapped inside a coffin as an American truck driver buried alive in Iraq. Rotten Tomatoes' critics consensus described it as a "nerve-wracking display" of his talent. That film, not a blockbuster, is where some critics first started treating him seriously.

• 4. The Deadpool Decade

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  Reynolds had expressed interest in a Deadpool film adaptation as early as 2005, the same year he was still doing romantic comedies about fat suits and friend zones. When X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) gave him a version of the character, he was open about his dissatisfaction. He described the development as a "frustrating experience" and said flatly that "it's the wrong version … Deadpool isn't correct in it". The real Deadpool project had been in development since around 2000, and Reynolds stayed attached to it through all the false starts.

  By the time Deadpool (2016) finally reached production, Reynolds chose to forgo his usual fee to protect the film's budget. He used the modest amount he did receive to keep co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick on set with him throughout filming. The film introduced a rebooted version of the character, erasing the Origins version entirely and building a new continuity closer to the Marvel Comics source. Critics praised Reynolds's performance. Michael O'Sullivan in The Washington Post wrote that Reynolds made Deadpool genuinely likeable. IGN's Daniel Krupa highlighted his "charismatic, exuberant, and larger-than-life" work, noting how difficult that was to sustain while spending much of the film inside a full-body costume or under heavy prosthetics. Deadpool grossed $782 million, making it the ninth-highest-grossing film of 2016.

  Deadpool 2 followed in 2018 and also reached the ninth spot on that year's global box office charts, grossing $715 million. Then came Deadpool & Wolverine in 2024, directed by Shawn Levy and co-starring Hugh Jackman. Reynolds has credited Jackman with introducing him to Levy, who went on to direct three of his films. Deadpool & Wolverine grossed $1.338 billion worldwide, making it the second-highest-grossing film of 2024 and, at the time of its release, the twentieth-highest-grossing film of all time. Reynolds earned a Golden Globe nomination for the first Deadpool, and the second and third films earned him Grammy nominations for their soundtrack compilations.

• 5. Brands, Business, and Wrexham

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  In February 2018, Reynolds acquired a stake in Aviation American Gin and took on a role overseeing its creative direction. That same month, his production company Maximum Effort launched alongside a three-year first-look deal with Fox. David Glickman, the founder of Mint Mobile, had served with Reynolds on the board of the Michael J. Fox Foundation and had been struck by Reynolds's marketing campaigns for Deadpool. In November 2019, Reynolds purchased a 20-25% ownership stake in Mint Mobile. He sold Aviation American Gin to the multinational drinks company Diageo in 2020 in a deal valued at up to $610 million. In March 2023, T-Mobile announced its acquisition of Mint Mobile for up to $1.35 billion.

  In September 2020, the Wrexham Supporters Trust announced that Reynolds and fellow actor Rob McElhenney were in talks to purchase the Welsh football club Wrexham. The takeover was confirmed in November 2020 and received approval from the Financial Conduct Authority in February 2021. The two learned Welsh, promoted the language through their media work, and were given the Diolch Y Ddraig award by Welsh broadcaster S4C. Reynolds arranged for Welsh subtitles to be added to his Netflix film Red Notice (2021). The entire journey of their stewardship was documented in Welcome to Wrexham, a series that debuted in 2022 and for which Reynolds has received two Primetime Emmy Awards as executive producer.

  Maximum Effort's marketing division was spun off in June 2021 and acquired by MNTN Software. Reynolds has also invested in Wealthsimple, 1Password, and FuboTV, briefly pursued ownership of the NHL's Ottawa Senators before withdrawing his bid in mid-2023, and became part of an investor group that acquired a 24% stake in the Alpine F1 Team.

• 6. Philanthropy and Public Life

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  In 2008, Reynolds ran the New York City Marathon for Team Fox, the fundraising arm of the Michael J. Fox Foundation. His father, James, had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, and Reynolds joined the foundation's board in 2009 to support research toward a cure. James Reynolds died in 2015 after a twenty-year battle with the disease. Reynolds has said that he used humour to process the loss, that he and his siblings were making their father laugh during his final moments, and that playing Deadpool helped him grieve. Becoming a parent, he has said, also helped him work through the complicated relationship he had with his father.

  In March 2022, Reynolds and his wife Blake Lively donated $500,000 to Water First, an organization providing Indigenous communities in Canada with access to clean water and training for young environmental technicians. Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the couple pledged to match donations up to $1 million for Ukrainian refugees. In July 2020, Reynolds and broadcaster George Stroumboulopoulos each offered $5,000 for the return of a stolen Build-A-Bear belonging to a Vancouver woman; the bear contained a recording of her deceased mother saying "I love you" in Filipino and was recovered within days. Reynolds and Lively donated $1 million to Feeding America after the October 2024 hurricanes Helene and Milton, and another $1 million to the International Committee of the Red Cross for children affected by the conflict between Israel and Gaza, making them the first celebrities to publicly donate to both sides amid that conflict.

  On the 19th of December 2024, Reynolds was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada, recognizing his contributions to film and philanthropy alike.

• 7. Anxiety, Identity, and the Persona

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  Reynolds revealed in 2018 that he had long been conducting interviews in character as Deadpool to manage his anxiety. The admission reframed years of public appearances. The wisecracking persona that critics and entertainment journalists had read as natural extroversion was, in part, a coping mechanism. In 2024, he described his anxiety as making him "quiet" and "shy" outside of performing.

  Several critics have noted the gap between the on-screen Reynolds and the off-screen one. CNBC observed that despite his reputation for playing snarky and sarcastic characters, he is widely regarded among industry peers as one of the nicest actors in Hollywood. Reynolds himself has said that "self-deprecating humour to me has always been something that helped", and he has described his storytelling instinct as "the bedrock foundation" of his success across industries.

  His personal life has drawn its own headlines. He began dating Alanis Morissette in 2002 after meeting her at Drew Barrymore's birthday party, and the couple became engaged in 2004 before splitting in February 2007. Morissette later said her seventh studio album, Flavors of Entanglement (2008), came from the heartbreak of the breakup; the song "Torch" was written specifically about Reynolds. He then dated Scarlett Johansson from April 2007, married her in a private ceremony on Vancouver Island in September 2008, and announced their separation on the 14th of December 2010. Their divorce was finalized in July 2011. Reynolds first met Blake Lively in July 2010 while filming Green Lantern. They married on the 9th of September 2012, at Boone Hall Plantation in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Following civil rights protests in 2020, the couple publicly apologized for the choice of venue and donated $200,000 to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Taylor Swift, a close friend of both, named characters in her 2020 song "Betty" after the Reynolds-Lively daughters; in November 2024, Reynolds confirmed that Swift is the godmother to his three daughters.