Dick Thomas Johnson from Tokyo, Japan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ryan Reynolds was born in Vancouver on October 23, 1976, the youngest of four brothers. That makes today his 50th birthday, which feels slightly wrong for a man who still plays a wisecracking mercenary in a red suit.
What's easy to forget, now that he is one of the most bankable names in Hollywood and part owner of a football club in north Wales, is how long it took. For roughly fifteen years Reynolds was the charming guy in movies people liked well enough and then forgot. The career most of us know now really only started at around 40.
I've always found that part of his story more interesting than the box office numbers, so here's the long version.
A teen soap and a pizza place
His first real job was on Hillside, a Canadian teen drama that also aired in the United States on Nickelodeon under the title Fifteen. Reynolds was a teenager himself at the time.
The break came with an ABC sitcom called Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, which ran from 1998 to 2001 (the network shortened the name to Two Guys and a Girl partway through, presumably once the pizza place stopped mattering). He played Berg, a medical student who talked fast and rarely took anything seriously. If you watch old clips now, the voice and the timing are already there.
The Van Wilder years
National Lampoon's Van Wilder, in 2002, turned him into a film lead. It was a broad college comedy, and it set the template for a lot of what followed: the quick-talking, likable guy who gets the best lines. Just Friends and Waiting followed in 2005, along with more serious attempts like The Amityville Horror and a turn as a vampire hunter in Blade: Trinity.
The Proposal, opposite Sandra Bullock in 2009, was a real hit. People magazine named him its Sexiest Man Alive the following year. He also did quieter, riskier work, including Buried (2010), in which he spends almost the entire film alone in a coffin. It is not a date movie.
Two superhero misfires
This is the stretch Reynolds himself loves to joke about. In X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009 he played Wade Wilson, the character who would later become Deadpool, except the film sewed his mouth shut. Fans of the comics, where Deadpool never stops talking, were not impressed.
Then came Green Lantern in 2011, a big-budget DC film that critics disliked and that made far less than the studio hoped. For a while it looked like the moment Reynolds had been lined up as a franchise star and it had not worked out. He has spent years since then mocking that film in his own projects, which is probably the healthiest response available.
The leaked test footage
Reynolds and director Tim Miller had shot a short test reel for a proper Deadpool film, foul-mouthed and very much aimed at adults, and the studio, Fox, had been unwilling to commit. In 2014 that footage leaked online. Fans loved it, and Fox greenlit the film soon after. (Nobody involved has ever seemed too upset about that leak.)
Deadpool opened in February 2016 with an R rating and a modest budget by superhero standards. It made close to 800 million dollars worldwide and became the highest-grossing R-rated film to that point. Deadpool 2 did similar business in 2018. Then Deadpool & Wolverine, with Hugh Jackman, passed a billion dollars in 2024 and became the biggest R-rated release ever.
Free Guy, Red Notice and The Adam Project kept him busy in between. Not all of them are great films, but they did well with audiences, and he became the rare star who could open a comedy on his name alone.
Gin, phones and a football club
The outside of a stand at the Racecourse Ground, home of Wrexham AFC. Rept0n1x, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Away from the cameras, Reynolds built a second career as a pitchman for brands he partly owned. He bought into Aviation Gin, which the drinks company Diageo agreed to buy in 2020 in a deal worth up to 610 million dollars. He was also the public face and part owner of Mint Mobile, which T-Mobile agreed to acquire in 2023. His company, Maximum Effort, made the jokey, low-budget ads for both, and the ads were often better known than the products.
The strangest move, and the one I would not have predicted, came in 2021. Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, the creator of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, completed their takeover of Wrexham AFC, a Welsh club then playing outside the English Football League. The FX docuseries Welcome to Wrexham followed the whole thing. The club then won three promotions in a row, in 2023, 2024 and 2025, which took it to the Championship, one step below the Premier League. Whatever you think of celebrity owners, that is a remarkable run.
He has been married to the actor Blake Lively since 2012, and the couple have four children.
Where to start if you're celebrating
If you want to mark the occasion, the obvious pick is the first Deadpool, which still holds up. For something different, try Buried, which shows how good he can be without the jokes. And if you have never watched Welcome to Wrexham, start at episode one. It is the closest thing we have to watching Reynolds be himself on camera, and some of the best scenes don't involve him at all.
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