“I’m going to be sent home via crematorium”: When Ryan Reynolds gave Denzel Washington a black eye twice
With a double life as the beloved Canadian actor and, overseas, the Wrexham AFC co-owner, Ryan Reynolds has led an impressively varied career. Alongside his acting abilities, his charisma and refined sense of humour have put him in good stead to take on the demanding world of entertainment. After breaking through in the 2000s with appearances in the comedies Waiting… and The Proposal, Reynolds deftly avoided the typecast with more serious roles in movies like Buried, Woman in Gold and Life.
Despite his range, Reynolds appears most at home in comedies and found his forte portraying the unconventional superhero Deadpool in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He debuted as the unconventional hero in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine alongside leading star Hugh Jackman but enjoyed widespread appreciation under the spotlight in 2016’s Deadpool and the 2018 sequel.
In July 2024, Reynolds returned to the MCU with Jackman and director Shawn Levy for the well-received Deadpool & Wolverine. With this success, the actor’s career seems to be riding on cloud nine, but back in the early 2010s, luck didn’t seem to be on Reynolds’ side. Following an appearance in the widely panned DC Comics movie Green Lantern in 2011, Reynolds’s days as a superhero seemed numbered. At around the same time, he had the chance to work with Denzel Washington and managed to humiliate himself to the point he thought his career would “cease”.
During an appearance on David Letterman’s Netflix show My Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman, Reynolds, the raconteur, explained how, on the second day of shooting Safe House with director Daniel Espinosa, he accidentally injured co-star Denzel Washington in an intense scene.
In the scene, Washington and Reynolds travel “in an out-of-control car” while having a scuffle. Reynolds’ character is supposed to “smash” Washington in the face, but unfortunately, Reynolds actually managed to inflict an injury on the Academy Award-winning actor. “There’s a scene in the movie where he crawls through the trunk in the back, and he grabs me and chokes me,” Reynolds recalled. “We were really driving a car at top speed.”
“He and I are in this out-of-control car, and the corner of my head — I felt it hit his eye so hard I was sure that it split wide open,” Reynolds continued. Although it was a mistake, such mistakes can be costly to high-budged projects when top-flight actors are the most expensive and irreplaceable resources. “I’m thinking I’m going to be sent home via crematorium — like, it’s over right now, this is it, not only my career but my actual pulse will cease.”
Fortunately, Reynolds turned around to see that his head hadn’t completely bloodied Washington’s eye. With just a mild black eye, the Training Day star brushed it off and put Reynolds at ease. “Hey, accidents happen,” Reynolds recalled Washington saying. “Let’s do it again. We’ll shoot it from the other side so we can keep shooting so we don’t see this.”
As they regrouped, Reynolds was relieved to know his career wasn’t in the balance with Washington making plans to blacklist him or worse. However, when they began to shoot the scene again, Reynolds hit Washington once again. “We did it again. [This time] I got the other eye, Dave,” Reynolds told Letterman. “For a minute, he looked like a Christmas ornament.” Adding humorously, “Yeah, I wanted to die.”
Considering the fact that both actors completed the movie – Washington with both eyes working and Reynolds still breathing – the pair managed to reconcile and get the scene down without too much disruption. As for Washington’s bruised eyes, they fortunately had a skilled make-up team on hand. Safe House hit the cinemas in 2012 to mixed reviews but was a success at the box office, paving the way to more resounding success for Reynolds later in the decade.
