Everything You Need to Know About Ryan Reynolds

Ryan Reynolds’ Early Life

Ryan Reynolds’ age is 49 years old at the time of writing, and he is due to celebrate his 50th birthday in October, as he was born on October 23, 1976. Vancouver-born Ryan Rodney Reynolds was the youngest of four brothers. James Chester Reynolds, his father, was a food wholesaler. His mother, Tamara Lee Stewart, lovingly referred to as “Tammy”, was a retail saleswoman.

The actor grew up around Kitsilano in Vancouver and went to the local high school there. He graduated from Kitsilano Secondary back in 1994. According to his brothers, Terry, Jeff and Patrick, Reynolds’ childhood was “fractuous” and the future actor suffered from anxiety. Despite that, he got into acting in 1989 at the age of 13, winning a role in a Nickelodeon teen soap opera called Hillside, which was filmed in Florida and released in the U.S. as Fifteen.

Reynolds returned to Vancouver after the series ended and appeared in TV movies and a CBC series called The Odyssey, but he was also struggling with the craft and nearly quit acting. He worked nights as a grocery store clerk at Safeway for a while and attended Kwantlen Polytechnic University, but dropped out after a couple of months to move to Los Angeles with his friend, Chris William Martin.

The two lived in a cheap motel to stretch their money as long as it could, until Reynolds landed his breakthrough role as Berg in the sitcom Two Guys and a Girl, which ran for four seasons from 1998 to 2001. It struggled to gain viewers to begin with, but it provided him with a platform to build on throughout the rest of his career.

A Hollywood Love Story

Ryan Reynolds' wife is actress Blake Lively. Their wedding took place on September 9, 2012. The two actually crossed paths while filming the superhero film Green Lantern in 2010. And they started dating for real the following year. Their love continued to grow from one year to the next, and their wedding followed soon after. They tied the knot at a private ceremony in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, with only friends and close family invited.

Lively is 11 years younger than her husband (born on August 25, 1987), and her birth name was Blake Ellender Brown. Globally known first and foremost as Serena van der Woodsen from the iconic 2000s teen drama Gossip Girl, Lively is also widely recognized for major films like A Simple Favor, The Age of Adaline, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and drama It Ends with Us (largely because of the legal dispute that followed involving its director). Her father was actor Ernie Lively.

Together, they’re known as a Hollywood power couple, and they often poke playful fun at one another on social media. Deep down, though, they’re clearly in love and support one another’s careers, although they’re rarely seen on the red carpet together.

Interestingly, when they first met, they were both in a relationship with other people. That time, Reynolds’ girlfriend was Scarlett Johansson and Lively was dating Penn Badgley. It wasn’t until they reconnected later on that they realised their chemistry and started dating in secret.

Today, they live in Pound Ridge, New York, at a $2 million estate, although they also have homes in Vancouver and Los Angeles. Despite their riches, though, they keep their family life relatively private and focus on raising their children in a normal environment. Somehow, they also find time for their business investments, which we’ll talk about later.

Children and Family Life

Moving on to the Ryan Reynolds’ kids, the actor has 4 children with Blake Lively. Starting with his three daughters, we begin with James Reynolds, who was born on December 16, 2014 and was named after Ryan’s father. She was followed by Inez Reynolds, who was born on September 30, 2016, and Betty Reynolds, who was born on October 4, 2019 and whose name was revealed by close friend Taylor Swift in the song of the same name. More recently, the couple’s only son Olin Reynolds was born in February 2023, though his name wasn’t revealed until over a year later.

As you can probably tell, Reynolds and Lively are fiercely protective of their children’s privacy and always put the family first. They take legal action if press photographers take photos of their children without consent, and they avoid taking them to public events and red carpets. 

Instead, they prioritise all of the usual childhood stuff and send the kids to regular schools. Ryan is open about the challenges of parenting and describes himself as a girl dad, joking about being outnumbered by the girls in the household. The two parents take it in turns working, with one staying home while the other one films. Because of that, it’s not uncommon for a long time to pass between one Reynolds’ movie and another.

As mentioned earlier, Taylor Swift is a close family friend and unofficial godmother who regularly visits the family. Blake occasionally home-schools the kids when they’re travelling, and they also have the support of Ryan’s three older brothers, Terry, Jeff and Patrick Reynolds. Ryan’s father James Chester Reynolds passed away from Parkinson’s disease in 2015, leaving the actor devastated, but his mother Tammy is still very much involved in looking after the family.

Ryan Reynolds’ Movies

This list starts with the Deadpool franchise, which is arguably his biggest success. 2016’s Deadpool grossed $782 million throughout the world, which set a record at the time for an R-rated movie, and it also earned him a Golden Globe nomination. Deadpool 2 was released in 2018 and grossed a further $785 million, also starring Josh Brolin as Cable. Then there was 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine, which grossed $1.3 billion and beat the series’ own record to become the new highest-grossing R-rated film of all time. 

But Reynolds’ filmography includes plenty of other films, too. For example, there was his breakout role in 2002’s National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, as well as restaurant-staff comedy Waiting…, which came out in 2005. Other comedy roles included 2005’s Just Friends, where he appeared in a fat suit, and 2008’s Definitely, Maybe, which he starred in opposite Rachel Weisz. 2009’s The Proposal was also a huge hit.

More recently, there was his 2021 appearance in Free Guy, where he appeared as a video game character who realises that he’s an NPC, earning a huge amount of praise for his performance. In the same year, he appeared alongside Dwayne Johnson and Gal Gadot in Red Notice, which became Netflix’s most watched movie at the time.

Other Ryan Reynolds’ movies include:

• Blade: Trinity (2004)
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
• Buried (2010)
• Green Lantern (2011)
• Safe House (2012)
• The Hitman’s Bodyguard (2017)
• Life (2017)
• 6 Underground (2019)
• The Adam Project (2022)
• Spirited (2022)
• IF (2024)

As if all that wasn’t enough, Reynolds has lent his voice to characters in The Croods (2013) and The Croods: A New Age (2020), as well as Turbo (2013) and Detective Pikachu (2019). He’s set to appear in Animal Friends in the summer of 2026. 

Entrepreneurship and Business Ventures

Ryan Reynolds is also a businessman and entrepreneur, with fingers in a number of pies. In 2018, he acquired an ownership stake in Portland’s Aviation Gin, which he promoted with a huge marketing campaign including an entertaining advert that he appeared in himself. The brand was sold to Diageo in February 2020 for $610 million, earning Reynolds $122 million in the process. Even today, he’s the face of the brand and its creative director. 

Mint Mobile is another of Reynolds’ businessventures, which he purchased an ownership stake in back in 2019. Just like Aviation Gin, he promoted it himself and the company was later sold to T-Mobile for $1.35 billion. That earned him another $300 million.

Perhaps most famously, Reynolds purchased Welsh football club Wrexham AFC with fellow actor Rob McElhenney from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, spending £2 million in the process. Wrexham is the third oldest football team in the world, and the pair’s ownership was chronicled by a documentary series called Welcome to Wrexham. Under Reynolds and McElhenney’s ownership, Wrexham was successfully promoted to the English Football League in 2023 after 15 years in the National League. 

Wrexham is a relatively small town of 65,000 people, and this investment in their football team has had a huge impact on local tourism, revitalising the town and providing jobs for many of its inhabitants.

And as if all of that wasn’t enough, Reynolds has also pumped money into tech startups, Formula 1 sponsorships and a ton of different charities. He’s so much more than just an actor. 

FAQs About Ryan Reynolds