“It was fucking awful”: the iconic TV show Ryan Reynolds refused to star in
These days, he’s one of Hollywood’s highest-paid stars and a business magnate, but Ryan Reynolds started his acting career in the same way as so many others: jobbing on TV.
The pipeline from bit parts on a myriad of shows to a regular role on a recurring series, and then increasingly substantial gigs on the big screen, has been a tried-and-trusted method for getting your name out there for decades, but the eventual A-lister did turn down one of its era’s biggest hits.
Having paid his dues with some early gigs in his native Canada, Reynolds gained his biggest Stateside exposure in 1996 when he appeared in an episode of The X-Files and in the made-for-television film that introduced Melissa Joan Hart’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch to the masses. Bigger things lay right around the corner, or at least they would have, had he been interested.
Since it was based on a failed movie, hopes weren’t exactly high when it was first announced that screenwriter Joss Whedon was adapting his failed horror comedy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, into a TV show. Of course, it became a defining small-screen staple of the 1990s and cultivated a huge fandom that’s still going strong today, but Reynolds couldn’t have cared less.
When Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered in March 1997, the actor was only a few months removed from turning 20, which is far from being ancient. However, with the early seasons pitching the core cast members as high school students, it was territory that he absolutely refused to return to onscreen.
“I love that show, and I loved Joss Whedon, the creator of the show, but my biggest concern was that I didn’t want to play a guy in high school,” he told the Toronto Star in 2008. “I had just come out of high school, and it was fucking awful.” Because of that, Buffy was a no-go, and he watched from afar as it spent most of its run drawing strong ratings and widespread acclaim.
While he didn’t mention what part he’d been offered, an educated guess would point toward Nicholas Brendon’s Xander Harris, since it’s unlikely that a showrunner would go to the lengths of offering a part to a specific actor if it wasn’t for one of the series’ leads. Ironically, Harris is five and a half years older than Reynolds, and he didn’t have any issues trying to pass himself off as a high school kid.
On the other hand, he may have dodged a bullet. While several of the Buffy cast have gone on to enjoy stellar careers in the 20+ years since it first went off the airwaves, Harris isn’t one of them. Meanwhile, in 1998, the year after it premiered, Reynolds landed his biggest Stateside gig to date when he was cast in the sitcom Two Guys and a Girl.
That was the launchpad that eventually got him to where he is today, even if it took a little longer than he would have liked, and none of that may have happened had he spent seven seasons in Sunnydale.
