Ryan Reynolds, (born October 23, 1976, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), Canadian actor known for being charismatic, quirky, and a quick-witted smart aleck.
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.
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 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 included 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 the sci-fi comedy Free Guy, portraying a bank teller who learns he is a character in a video game. 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.
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).
