Ryan Reynolds(1976–)

Ryan Rodney Reynolds was born at Vancouver General Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the twenty-third of October 1976, fourth and youngest son of James Chester Reynolds, an Irish-Canadian wholesale-food-distribution executive of the Vancouver Irish-Catholic community, and Tammy Stewart, of mixed Scottish-Irish-English Canadian descent. He was raised in the Kitsilano and Point Grey middle-class Vancouver residential districts, was schooled at Kitsilano Secondary School, and took up acting at fourteen on the 1991 Vancouver junior CBC television series Hillside. He worked across the 1990s on Canadian and American television (Two Guys and a Girl, ABC 1998 to 2001) and pivoted to film leads in the early 2000s with Van Wilder (2003) and the romantic comedies of the mid-2000s.

He took the Deadpool role for the first time in X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009 and then pursued the Marvel project on a five-year personal-passion development through to the standalone Deadpool of February 2016 (Twentieth Century Fox, directed by Tim Miller). Deadpool grossed $783 million worldwide on a $58 million budget, the highest-grossing R-rated film in cinema history at release. Deadpool 2 (2018) added $785 million; Deadpool & Wolverine (Disney-Marvel, July 2024) added $1.3 billion, taking the standing R-rated cinema record. The Deadpool trilogy is the central single Reynolds Hollywood-leading-role catalogue.

His business career across the same period built the leading celebrity-business portfolio of his generation. He acquired the majority shareholding in Aviation American Gin in 2018, sold it to Diageo in August 2020 for $610 million. He acquired the majority shareholding in Mint Mobile (the Los Angeles wireless MVNO) in 2019, sold it to T-Mobile US in March 2023 for $1.35 billion. He founded Maximum Effort, the Los Angeles production and creative-advertising company that has produced the Welcome to Wrexham FX documentary series and the modern Reynolds-branded advertising campaigns for both his own properties and external clients.

On the seventeenth of November 2020, with the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia co-creator Rob McElhenney, he completed the two-million-pound purchase of Wrexham A.F.C., the oldest Welsh football club (founded 1864), then competing in the fifth-tier National League. The joint Reynolds-McElhenney ownership has taken Wrexham through three consecutive promotions: National League title 2022-23 (back to the EFL after fifteen years), League Two promotion 2023-24, League One promotion 2024-25, with the 2025-26 season the first Wrexham Championship season since 1981-82. The Welcome to Wrexham FX documentary series (28 episodes across 2022 to 2024, won the 2023 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Unstructured Reality Programming) brought the club into the international popular-sports recognition.

He married the American actress Blake Lively in 2012; they have four children. He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2024 on the strength of his Canadian-cultural-and-philanthropic contributions. The Reynolds name in modern Wrexham-and-North-American-cinema culture carries the weight of the Deadpool trilogy, the standing two billion-dollar business exits, and the Wrexham A.F.C. transformation.