Ryan Reynolds

Ryan Reynolds (born October 23, 1976, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) is a Canadian actor known for being charismatic, quirky, and a quick-witted smart aleck.

Early years and career

Reynolds’s father was a food wholesaler, and his mother was a retail salesperson. He grew up the youngest of four brothers in an Irish Catholic family in Vancouver. He began acting at age 13 after attending an open casting call and landing a lead role in Nickelodeon’s teen soap opera Hillside (in the United States, Fifteen, 1991–93). After returning to Vancouver, he appeared in several TV movies and played a recurring role in the CBC fantasy series The Odyssey (1993–94) before graduating from Kitsilano Secondary School in 1994.

Reynolds subsequently started his own improv group, Yellow Snow. He also appeared in TV series such as Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years (1995), The Outer Limits (1995), and The X-Files (1996) while working nights as a grocery store clerk to make ends meet. In hopes of finding more reliable and steady work, he dropped out of Kwantlen Polytechnic University after only a few months and moved with a friend to Los Angeles when he was 19 years old.

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Hollywood career

After moving to Hollywood, Reynolds played a few supporting roles in TV series and movies. He was offered the role of Xander in Joss Whedon’s series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) but turned it down because he did not want to play a teenager anymore. Instead, he landed the role of medical school student Berg in the ABC sitcom Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place (1998–2001). The series helped Reynolds develop his gifts for mimicry and imbecilic bumbling, qualities that were also showcased in his lead role in National Lampoon’s Van Wilder (2002). The screwball college comedy became a cult hit.

That role brought Reynolds work in a variety of genres. He starred in the Canadian heist flick Foolproof (2003), which was a box-office disappointment, and voiced the sidekick of Leslie Nielsen’s bumbling crime fighter in the Teletoon animated comedy series Zeroman (2004–05). He made the jump to big-budget Hollywood fare with a supporting role opposite Michael Douglas and Albert Brooks in the comedy The In-Laws (2003) and starred with Wesley Snipes in the action movie Blade: Trinity (2004), for which he trained for three months and gained 25 pounds.

His status as a Hollywood star firmly established, Reynolds starred or costarred in the comedies Waiting (2005), Just Friends (2005), Adventureland (2009), and The Change-Up (2011); the romantic comedies Definitely, Maybe (2008) with Rachel Weisz and The Proposal (2009) opposite Sandra Bullock; and the action movies Smokin’ Aces (2006), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), Green Lantern (2011), R.I.P.D. (2013), Self/less (2015), and Deadpool (2016). The latter film, about the Marvel Comics antihero, was a blockbuster hit, and Reynolds subsequently starred in and cowrote the sequel, Deadpool 2 (2018). He later appeared with Will Ferrell in Spirited (2022), a musical comedy inspired by Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Reynolds also appeared in the action comedies The Hitman’s Bodyguard (2017), The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard (2021), and Red Notice (2021). His thrillers include Buried (2010), in which he played an American contractor entombed in a coffin in Iraq; Safe House (2012), about a CIA agent trying to protect a criminal (played by Denzel Washington); and 6 Underground (2019), about a billionaire who recruits a team to overthrow a dictator. In 2021 he starred in Free Guy, portraying a bank teller who learns he is a character in a video game; the sci-fi comedy also featured Jodie Comer. In The Adam Project (2022), Reynolds took the role of a time traveler who joins forces with his preteen self and late father to save the future, making peace with his past along the way. In 2024 Reynolds returned to the world of Marvel to star opposite Hugh Jackman in Deadpool & Wolverine.

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Reynolds also lent his voice to the family films The Croods (2013) and its sequel (2020), Turbo (2013), and Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019). Exhibiting his skill for self-mockery, he played himself in an episode of Seth MacFarlane’s series Family Guy (2011) and made memorable cameo appearances in MacFarlane’s feature comedies Ted (2012) and A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014).

Reynolds’s more serious movies were among his least successful. The dramas The Nines (2007), Fireflies in the Garden (2008), and Chaos Theory (2008) were all poorly received both critically and commercially, and Atom Egoyan’s thriller The Captive (2014), in which Reynolds starred as the father of a kidnapped girl, was booed by audiences and panned by critics upon its debut at the Cannes film festival. Somewhat better received was Woman in Gold (2015), in which he played a lawyer helping a Jewish woman (Helen Mirren) recover a painting stolen by Nazis during World War II.

Business ventures

In 2011 Reynolds and screenwriter Allan Loeb (Rock of Ages, Here Comes the Boom) founded DarkFire, a production company based at 20th Century Fox TV, which specialized in developing comedy series for television. Reynolds cocreated another company, Maximum Effort, in 2018, which produces films and advertisements. In 2020 Reynolds and fellow actor Rob McElhenney bought Wrexham AFC, a Welsh football (soccer) team. Their stewardship of the team is chronicled in the popular documentary series Welcome to Wrexham (2022– ).

Charity and advocacy work

A committed environmentalist and activist, Reynolds has been involved over the years with a number of charities. In 2008 he ran the New York City Marathon to raise money for the Michael J. Fox Foundation and in honor of his father, who was diagnosed with Parkinson disease about 1994. Reynolds served on the foundation’s board of directors.

Reynolds executive-produced and narrated the eco-conscious Canadian documentary The Whale (2011). He worked with the environmental organization Natural Resources Defense Council to advocate for renewable energy and to bring attention to the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In addition, he helped raise funds for relief efforts following the 2010 Haiti earthquake and, together with his wife, Blake Lively, donated $1 million to North American food banks during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Reynolds has contributed to the Vancouver and Toronto locations of Covenant House, which provides shelter to runaways and homeless people, and he frequently visits children’s hospitals. In addition, he has supported children’s causes in Africa, including the education of former child soldiers in Uganda and the care of orphans in Malawi.

Personal life

Reynolds was engaged to singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette from June 2004 to February 2007, when they called off their engagement. Shortly thereafter Reynolds began dating actor Scarlett Johansson, whom he married on September 27, 2008; they divorced in 2011. That year he and his Green Lantern costar Blake Lively began dating, and they were married on September 9, 2012. The couple has four children.

The original version of this entry was published by The Canadian Encyclopedia.