Ryan Reynolds

Biography

Ryan Reynolds (born October 23, 1976, in Vancouver) is a Canadian-American actor, comedian, screenwriter and film producer, best known for comedies and superhero films. He began acting as a teenager and has become one of the most recognizable faces of mainstream film over the past two decades. Beyond acting, he has built a career as a businessman and co-owner of football clubs, which has given him visibility well beyond the screen.

Reynolds started out in 1991 in the Canadian teen soap opera Hillside, which Nickelodeon distributed in the United States as Fifteen. After a series of minor television roles, he became known in America through the sitcom Two Guys and a Girl (1998-2001), where he played a medical student. His move into film came with comedies such as National Lampoon's Van Wilder (2002) and action fare such as Blade: Trinity (2004), in which he played a vampire hunter alongside Wesley Snipes. Over the following years he mixed low-budget projects with bigger romantic comedies, including Just Friends (2005) and The Proposal (2009) opposite Sandra Bullock, which brought him to a wider audience.

He first played Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), a character he would later carry in a film of his own. That role, and the R-rated Deadpool (2016), launched the most commercially successful phase of his career, a mix of irreverent humour and action that continued in Deadpool 2 (2018) and Deadpool & Wolverine (2024). He has also taken on more serious material, such as Buried (2010), a claustrophobic thriller shot almost entirely inside a coffin, for which he received a Goya nomination, and the science-fiction thriller Life (2017). In animation he voiced Pikachu in Detective Pikachu (2019), and in 2021 he starred in Free Guy, an action comedy about a video game character.

In his personal life, Reynolds has been married to actress Blake Lively since 2012, and they have four children. His earlier relationship with actress Scarlett Johansson, who was his wife for a few months in 2008, drew considerable press attention. In business he has taken stakes in the gin brand Aviation American Gin and the phone company Mint Mobile, and in 2020 he acquired Wrexham AFC, the Welsh football club he runs with Rob McElhenney; the project is the subject of the documentary series Welcome to Wrexham.

His legacy rests largely on the Deadpool series, which gave him a distinctive place in superhero cinema and turned his humour into a constant presence in the marketing of his films. Reynolds remains active as an actor and producer, and his public profile extends well beyond the cinema.

Key films

• Blade: Trinity (2004): plays Hannibal King, a vampire hunter who joins Blade against Dracula.
• Just Friends (2005): plays a teenager trying to move past the friend zone during a Christmas visit home.
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009): first appearance of Deadpool, the character he would later lead in his own films.
• The Proposal (2009): a boss who forces his assistant, played by Sandra Bullock, to marry him to avoid deportation.
• Deadpool (2016): the wisecracking mercenary from the comics, in an R-rated action comedy.
• Free Guy (2021): a non-player character who discovers he lives inside a video game.