There is a photograph of Ryan Reynolds at age three, standing in the wading pool at the Kits Community Centre on Oliver Crescent, grinning at the camera with the kind of confidence that suggests he already knew something the rest of us were still working out. The photo ran in the Vancouver Sun. His home address was included. Vancouver was a different place then.
Ryan Rodney Reynolds was born on October 23, 1976, the youngest of four brothers in an Irish-Catholic family in Vancouver. His father was a police officer. Two of his brothers followed him into the force; one joined the RCMP. The Reynolds household was working class, the neighbourhood was Kitsilano, and the beach was two minutes away. It is, by most measures, an excellent place to grow up.
He attended Kitsilano Secondary School — the same school where Joshua Jackson was a classmate — and graduated in 1994. He had already been acting for a year by then, having landed a lead role in the Nickelodeon teen soap opera Hillside (known in the US as Fifteen) at age thirteen after walking into an open casting call. He also, famously, failed an acting class at the same school. The teacher who failed him has presumably had some time to reflect on that decision.
After graduation, he started an improv group called Yellow Snow — a name that tells you everything you need to know about the man's sense of humour — and appeared in a string of BC-shot television series while working nights as a grocery store clerk. At nineteen, he dropped out of Kwantlen College and moved to Los Angeles with a friend. He was looking for steady work. He found rather more than that.
Kitsilano Beach — two minutes from Oliver Crescent, where it all started
The Neighbourhood That Made Him
Kitsilano in the 1980s was a neighbourhood of craftsman houses, corner stores, and the kind of beach that makes you feel the rest of the world is operating at the wrong pace. It was also, quietly, a place that produced an unusual number of people who would go on to do unusual things.
Reynolds has never been shy about where he came from. When Kitsilano Secondary held its virtual graduation ceremony in 2020 — the pandemic year — he recorded a four-minute address for the graduating class. He cracked jokes. He was warm. He told them the truth about what comes next. It was, by all accounts, exactly what you would want from a graduation speech.
Quick Facts
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The Long Road to Deadpool
Hollywood did not hand Reynolds anything quickly. He spent the better part of a decade playing supporting roles and likeable leads in films that ranged from cult hits (National Lampoon's Van Wilder, 2002) to expensive disappointments (Green Lantern, 2011). He has since described the Green Lantern experience with characteristic precision: "Poster first, release date second, script last." It is a diagnosis of a particular kind of Hollywood failure that resonates well beyond that one film.
The role that changed everything — Deadpool — took over a decade to get made. Reynolds had been attached to the character since a brief, poorly received appearance in X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009. He stayed with it because he believed in it, and because Deadpool — ironic, fourth-wall-breaking, foul-mouthed, and genuinely funny — was a character that fit him like a suit.
When the film finally arrived in 2016, shot in Vancouver, it became the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, taking more than US$783 million at the global box office. He brought the shoot home deliberately. Unlike many productions that film in Vancouver while pretending to be somewhere else, Deadpool celebrated the city. It was a choice that said something about the man making it.
"Poster first, release date second, script last."
— Reynolds on Green Lantern
Box Office
$783M+
Deadpool (2016) — highest-grossing R-rated film at the time
Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) surpassed it — the new record holder. Reynolds also received a writing credit on both.
Behind the scenes — the suit that took a decade to earn
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The Gin That Sold for $610 Million
And the marketing strategy that made it happen
In 2018, Reynolds became a co-owner of Aviation American Gin, a Portland-distilled spirit built on seven botanicals — juniper, cardamom, coriander, lavender, anise seed, sarsaparilla, and dried orange peel — that produce something drier and more floral than a London dry. It was already the second-largest super-premium gin in the United States. Reynolds proceeded to make it significantly larger.
His approach to marketing Aviation became a case study in what he would later call "fastvertising" — the practice of responding to cultural moments with speed and wit, before the moment passes. The most celebrated example came in December 2019, when Peloton released a Christmas advertisement that was widely criticised for its tone. Within seventy-two hours, Reynolds had produced and released an Aviation Gin ad featuring the same actress, sitting with two friends, drinking gin with the expression of someone who had recently escaped something. The ad went viral. The tagline was "Exercise bike not included."
In August 2020, Diageo acquired Aviation American Gin in a deal worth up to $610 million. Reynolds had owned it for two years.
$610M
Sold to Diageo, Aug 2020
Owned for 2 years. The deal included a potential earnout of up to $275M.
The Aviation
The cocktail that named the gin
Shake all ingredients with ice. Double-strain into a chilled coupe. The crème de violette gives it that pale lavender hue — the colour of a clear sky at altitude. Garnish with a brandied cherry. Drink slowly.
The $1.35 Billion Phone Plan
While Aviation Gin was still in play, Reynolds had also taken a stake in Mint Mobile, a budget wireless carrier that sold prepaid plans at a fraction of what the major carriers charged. His ownership stake was minority, but his involvement was anything but. He appeared in the company's advertisements with the same self-deprecating wit he brought to everything else, and the brand grew accordingly.
In March 2023, T-Mobile announced it was acquiring Mint Mobile's parent company in a deal worth up to $1.35 billion. Reynolds had been involved for roughly five years. The pattern was becoming clear: find a good product, make it funny, make it human, and then sell it to someone much larger for an amount that makes the original investment look like a rounding error.
The marketing agency he founded in 2018 — Maximum Effort — is the engine behind all of it. The agency's website describes its purpose as making "movies, TV series, content and cocktails for the personal amusement of Ryan Reynolds." It is, characteristically, both accurate and slightly misleading. Maximum Effort has become one of the most influential creative shops in advertising, and Reynolds has been named to Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential companies for his work there.
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The Football Club in Wales
In 2020, Reynolds and actor Rob McElhenney — the creator of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia — bought Wrexham AFC, a Welsh football club founded in 1864 and one of the oldest professional clubs in the world. They paid approximately £2 million. The club was in the National League, the fifth tier of English football. It had not been promoted in fifteen years.
The story that followed became the FX/Hulu documentary series Welcome to Wrexham, which documented the club's journey with an honesty that surprised people who expected a vanity project. Reynolds and McElhenney were genuinely invested — in the club, in the town, in the people who had supported the Red Dragons through decades of disappointment.
In 2023, Wrexham won the National League title and were promoted to League Two. In 2024, they were promoted again to League One. In 2025, they reached the Championship — the second tier of English football — for the first time in decades. Three consecutive promotions. The club that was worth £2 million is now estimated to be worth considerably more than that, and it is playing against teams that were in the Premier League within living memory.
Reynolds and McElhenney celebrating promotion — three times and counting
Maximum Effort
What makes Reynolds unusual — and what makes him interesting to write about in a magazine that values craft — is that the wit is not a performance. It is the strategy. He has spoken openly about living with anxiety, about the way he tends to overbook himself as a way of managing it, about the gap between the confident persona and the person underneath. He is, in that sense, a man who built a career on playing a character who says the quiet part loud, while being someone who has spent considerable effort learning when to say nothing at all.
He received the Order of British Columbia in 2023, and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2024. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a Governor General's Performing Arts Award. He has four children with Blake Lively, whom he married in 2012. He has described both of them as having grown up "very working class," and he has said — with the kind of specificity that suggests he means it — that he thinks about that often.
He still talks about Vancouver. He still talks about Kitsilano. When asked about being a Canadian in Hollywood, he said: "A common denominator among Canadians is there's a commitment to what's right." It is, for a man who has made a career out of irony, a remarkably straight answer.
The Many Faces of Maximum Effort
The actor
The brand visionary
The football owner
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The Scorecard
Best Days Ever No. 32
A Note from Gerald
I have been to Kitsilano Beach. I have sat on the sand with the mountains behind me and the city in front of me and thought: this is one of the better places on earth to be young. I understand why it produces people who are confident in their own skin. The light there does something to you.
What I find genuinely interesting about Reynolds — beyond the numbers, beyond the deals — is that he has never pretended the wit is effortless. He has talked about the anxiety, the overbooking, the gap between the persona and the person. That kind of honesty is rarer than the billion-dollar exits. It is also, I suspect, the thing that makes the rest of it work.
He grew up two blocks from the beach. He failed an acting class. He moved to LA at nineteen with no safety net. He spent a decade trying to get a superhero film made that everyone told him was a bad idea. He sold a gin company for $610 million and a phone company for $1.35 billion and he still talks about Kitsilano like it is the most important place he has ever been.
From the wading pool on Oliver Crescent to the Order of Canada. Ryan Reynolds, that is a Best Day Ever. Without question.