The 1990s role that almost sent Ryan Reynolds into Hollywood exile: “I ended up working at a warehouse”
If there’s one thing that Ryan Reynolds is very, very good at, other than appearing in films in which he seems to play essentially the same character just either with or without a mask on, it’s making money. Lots, and lots, and lots of money.
Thanks to all those movies, buying up Welsh football teams, launching mobile phone companies and gin brands, the Canadian actor’s personal wealth is pretty much on a par with the gross domestic product of a small country; a quick Google reveals that country to be Palau, which I’ve never heard of but is apparently in the Pacific Ocean somewhere.
The point is that Reynolds is not short of a quid (or dollar) or two, and probably doesn’t even have to think twice about going to Five Guys for a burger, unlike the rest of us who have to save up for several months to do it. He probably even gets a milkshake, the swine.
But things haven’t always been quite as financially rosy for Reynolds, certainly not when he started out in the early 1990s while still a teenager. His first acting gig was on a Canadian teen soap called Hillside, rebranded as Fifteen in the US. He made 13 episodes of the show as a character called Billy Simpson, who was dealing with getting bullied, and made the kind of money that, to a kid, seemed like a king’s ransom.
He recalled, “I remember we were paid 150 bucks per episode, and I still had a paper route. So I would do my TV show, and then I’d go home and do my paper route each day. For me, I thought I was, like, a gajillionaire.”
Despite the acting job making him feel rich, it wasn’t enough to make him stick with it in the short term, however. Reynolds took a couple of years out of the industry before he landed his next role in the 1993 movie Ordinary Magic, during which he admitted he got some “real life experience”, saying, “I ended up working at a warehouse, and I worked at a restaurant for two years. It’s actually good, I’m glad I did that because I didn’t end up like a child actor with some depraved drug addiction.”
It was indeed probably a wise decision, because while it might sound like a fun comedy about witches or something, Ordinary Magic was in fact nothing of the sort, and was actually a hard-hitting drama in which Reynolds plays an Indian boy who loses his father only to move to Canada and help his aunt go on hunger strike because she can’t pay her landlord. Sounds cheery.
Reynolds’ performance went down well enough, though, that he never really struggled for work ever again, taking on roles in a string of TV shows like The X-Files and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, before in the early 2000s he began to make the kind of films he would become known for: sex comedies like Van Wilder: Party Liaison and Harold & Kumar Get the Munchies.
He currently has some 11 different upcoming projects listed as being in various stages of readiness, including another Pokémon Detective Pikachu movie (sigh), plus two remakes, firstly the 1985 Tim Curry whodunnit Clue, and then Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, the action comedy that was originally a hit for Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges back in 1974.
