The director who told Ryan Reynolds he’d never make it: “It was a crushing moment”
Whether you’re a fan of him playing himself in virtually every movie he’s made for the last decade and a half or not, what can’t be denied is that Ryan Reynolds is a big star. One of the biggest, in fact.
He’s constantly floating around the list of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors, he co-wrote and produced three of the four highest-grossing R-rated movies in cinema history, and, in quite the about-turn from where he was a while ago, it’s been a long time since he appeared in anything that audiences didn’t want to watch.
Whether it’s the box office or streaming numbers, Reynolds is on a roll, with the likes of the Deadpool trilogy, Michael Bay’s 6 Underground, The Adam Project, Spirited, Free Guy, Red Notice, Detective Pikachu, and The Hitman’s Bodyguard all securing plenty of eyeballs, which doesn’t mean that all of them are good. Far from it, since many of them are rubbish, but that’s not really the point.
As mentioned, it did take him a good few years to clamber his way onto the A-list, with his earlier attempts at leading man stardom usually ending in failure. He was booked and busy, but he wasn’t quite a made man until the mid-to-late 2010s, 20 years after a director told him that no matter how hard he tried, he simply wasn’t cut out to succeed in Tinseltown.
Reynolds isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and it’s frustrating that he’s shown himself to be a very talented performer when he drops his usual schtick and plays a character with some meat on their bones, but doesn’t seem arsed about doing it again. Still, he’s rich, famous, and oversees a business empire.
If that isn’t the definition of making it, then fuck knows what is. And to think, the guy who told him that he didn’t have the chops was the same person who helmed Christian Bale’s nonsensical Reign of Fire and Jennifer Garner’s career-stalling Elektra, which becomes more ironic with each passing year.
In 1996, a fresh-faced Reynolds appeared in a Bowman-directed episode of The X-Files, the third season’s ‘Syzygy’, where he plays a high school jock who gets murdered as part of a satanic plot. It wasn’t his first screen appearance, but it was the one that brought him the most exposure to date, and his confidence was summarily dashed.
“He told me never to go to Hollywood,” he informed GQ. “Because I’d never made it there, first and foremost. And secondly, that I could have a very small yet profitable career here in Vancouver doing small parts. Being hung by the neck by twin witches. ‘Stay small’. It was a crushing moment, I must say. It was also inspiring, though.”
Fast forward to today, and Reynolds is an A-list movie star, a gin magnate, either the owner or co-owner of a production company, marketing agency, football team, and mobile phone service provider with an estimated net worth of around $400 million, so saying he was right not to heed Bowman’s advice is an understatement of epic proportions.
