With “Green Lantern,” “Buried,” Scarlett Johansson as his wife (since divorced), and numerous projects in development, Ryan Reynolds has reached the apotheosis of his career: he has proven his longevity is no fluke and has successfully reinvented himself; he is Ben Affleck without the tragedy. For Reynolds in his early career, there was no ambition for greatness. He was content with things like “Two Guys, A Girl, and a Pizza Place,” “Big Monster on Campus,” and the cult comedy, “Van Wilder.”
He was born in Vancouver in 1976 and with no professional acting training joined the Nickelodeon series “Fifteen” in 1990. He jumped around in ubiquitous television programs and made-for-TV productions before “Two Guys and a Girl” gave him some sort of exposure leading up to “Finder’s Fee” and “Van Wilder.” By the time of “Waiting” in 2005, Reynolds had established himself to his fans as a variation of the Wilder character: a sophomoric goofball who has yet to amount to anything (cf. his role in “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle”). He was the lead in “Just Friends,” “The Nines,” and the schmaltzy “Definitely, Maybe.”
By the end of the 2000s, and in the wake of his marriage to Scarlett Johansson in 2008, Reynolds suddenly emerged in major mainstream projects: the comedy “Adventureland,” Wade Wilson in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” and the lead in the low budget Hitchockian thriller “Buried,” the delight of the Sundance Film Festival in 2010.
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Ryan on the Screen
He’s Captain Excellent in “Paper Man,” Andrew in “The Proposal,” Mike in “Adventureland,” Frank in “Chaos Theory,” Richard in “Smokin’ Aces,” George in “The Amityville Horror,” Hannibal King in “Blade: Trinity,” Mark Tobias in “The In-Laws,” and Wade Wilson in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.”
Ryan Says
On dark energies:
“I believe in energy like dark energies. I believe that when a family moves into a house where six murders took place, there’s going to be some bad juju in that house. But then again what the hell is wrong with you to be moving in that house to begin with?”