Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively are arguably the closest thing America has to royalty.
After 12 years of marriage (an eternity in Hollywood years) and four kids, they have gone from rom-com stars to business titans who schmooze at White House state dinners, revolutionise historic football clubs and co-host the prestigious Met Gala.
They’re a mainstay of pop culture, never shying away from PDT (public displays of trolling). Whether it’s Reynolds posting unflattering pictures of his wife on set and captioning it “#nofilter”, or Lively calling out her husband for flexing his muscles while saving a turtle, the A-list couple’s loving wisecracks have made them tabloid favourites.
But behind the scenes they’re shrewd business people whose leftfield investments aren’t publicity stunts - but extreme wealth generating moves.
Most notably Reynolds bought the third-oldest football club in the world, Wrexham FC, in November 2020 to help turn the fifth-tier Welsh team into a serious contender for promotion to League 2 alongside fellow actor Rob McElhenney. The pair paid £2.5 million each and quickly ploughed £10 million into the club for a new pitch, produced a Disney+ documentary about it and invited the likes of Will Ferrell and Emma Corrin to watch matches from the sidelines.
Reynolds’ football punt has made him a local hero and given him a chance to flaunt his impressive entrepreneurial skills — skills he has honed over the years with stakes in phone companies, production agencies and drinks brands.
Now he’s set his sights on Alpine’s Formula 1 team after being a part of a huge investment group, which also includes Otro Capital, RedBird Capital Partners and fellow actor Michael B Jordan. Together they purchased a 24 per cent stake in the racing squad in a gigantic £171m deal, proving Reynolds is fast on his way to becoming a sporting titan.
Blake, on the other hand, has carved a niche with her non-alcoholic drinks company, Betty Buzz.
From savvy investments to social-media stunts, here’s how Ryan and Blake are on course to become Hollywood’s next billionaires.
An on set meet-cute and awkward double date
The two met on the set of Green Lantern in 2010, where Reynolds starred as the titular DC Comics superhero and Lively played his love interest, Carol Ferris. However, both were actually in separate relationships at the time — Lively with her Gossip Girl co-star Penn Badgley, with Reynolds married to actress Scarlett Johansson.
A year later, they found themselves single and on a double date. The catch? They were each meant to be there with someone else. “She was on a date with another guy and I was on a date with another girl. That was the most awkward date [from their perspective] probably because we were just, like, fireworks coming across,” said Reynolds of the date in a GQ cover story.
“We were hanging out at this little restaurant in Tribeca that’s open really late, and this song came on and I was just like, ‘Want to dance?’ No one was in there, so it was just totally empty. And it was just one of those moments where, halfway through the dance, it was like, ‘Oh, I think I just crossed a line.’ And then I walked her home. And, uh, you know, I don’t really need to go into what happened after that,” he continued.
Soon after, they randomly found themselves taking the same train to Boston and the rest is history. Their romance progressed “like a fairy tale,” said Reynolds. “A week later, I was like: ‘We should buy a house together.’ And we did.”
Within a year, they were married. Controversially, the ceremony took place at former slave plantation Boone Hall in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, with Reynolds later admitting it was a “giant f**king mistake” after being called out for the hypocrisy of a 2018 tweet where he praised Black Panther, the first superhero film featuring a largely Black cast.
Transitioning from movie stars to near-billionaire investors
In 2020, Forbes named Reynolds the second-highest-paid actor, having earned $106 million (£85m) that year. Due to his off-screen ventures as well, only two years later, his net worth was $650 million (£524m) — and it’s only set to grow.
It all started when he struck a savvy deal when signing off the Marvel movie Deadpool in 2016. Although he was “only” paid $2.6 million up front (£2m), he negotiated a share of the box office profits — earning him $22 million (£17.7m) of the $786 million (£631m) take home. For Deadpool 2 in 2018, he signed his production company on, meaning he earned a rumoured $40 million (£32.2m) alone for the film.
With 48 million followers on Instagram and 21 million on Twitter, Reynolds is also a master at social media, which helps propel his films to box office hits. To promote Deadpool, the actor posed in character on a bearskin rug, copying Burt Reynolds’ famous nude Cosmopolitan centrefold in 1972, and handed out tacos —the character’s favourite food — from a truck at the Superbowl. His charm and fun persona when advertising movies contributes to him now earning $30 million (£24.1m) per film. It’s that coupled with Ryan and Blake’s mystique that’s proved such a winning formula.
“They are masters of what I call ‘The Rubberband Theory’ in marketing. If you are constantly in the press and give away too much information, you become overexposed,” says celebrity expert Coco Mocoe. “Fans never have enough mystery around you to feel that pull away. And, like a rubberband, you need tension in order for it to snap back even closer than before when you do appear publicly,” she continues, citing their highly strategic yet not overdone publicity stunts.
“Blake Lively especially is not constantly seen publicly or taking part in every campaign. But she is always memorable at the Met Gala and that seems to have raised her prestige.”
Still, their acting payouts are nothing compared to Reynolds’ role in Aviation Gin, which almost doubled his net worth overnight in 2020. It all started in 2018, when Reynolds purchased a stake in the Oregon alcohol brand. Reynolds told Gentleman's Journal at the time: “I mean, I’m not remotely involved in production of the gin, because I know nothing about distilling. But I’m there for every other aspect of the business, because I really love this gin.”
His love of gin earned Reynolds a fortune in August 2020, when the company was sold for $610 million (£490m), with the actor reportedly taking a huge payout from his rumoured 25 per cent share. It wasn’t beginner’s investment luck, either, his stake in Mint Mobile earned him a staggering $245 million (£197m) when communications giant T-Mobile announced it was buying the company for more than $1 billion (£803m).
He also runs a film production company and marketing agency, Maximum Effort, that was behind the famous Peloton advert featuring Sex and the City star Chris Noth, the actor who played Big (and was killed off after having a heart attack on a Peloton) which saved the brand’s image, and sits on the board of the Match Group — the company behind dating apps Tinder and Hinge.
He also invests in Canadian wealth-management service Wealthsimple — valued at $5 billion (£4.1bn) — and works with Canadian password-management software company 1Password, which is worth $6.8 billion (£5.5bn).
Then, of course, there is his venture into sports. After all the buzz surrounding his purchase of Wrexham FC last year, he bought a stake in sports channel FuboTV, where he is planning to start producing programmes for it. Moreover, he’s reportedly thinking about buying his own major league ice hockey team, the Otta Senators. “I am trying to do that,” he said. “It’s very expensive, I need a partner with really deep pockets. It’s called a consortium when you form a group together to buy an entity. It’s just a fancy way of saying I need a sugar mommy or a sugar daddy.” He did, however, dip his finger into the lucrative Formula 1 world, and is now part-owner of the Alpines F1 team after being part of a mega £171m deal.
Lively has also flexed her entrepreneurial muscles with her non-alcoholic sparkling drinks brand Betty Buzz, and is a brand ambassador for Chanel, L’Oreal, and Stella McCartney. In 2014 she launched an ill-fated lifestyle and ecommerce website called Preserve, which she shuttered in 2015. At the time, she admitted she’d launched the site too early. “I know what it’ll look like, what I’m facing publicly, that people are just going to have a heyday with this,” she told Vogue at the time. “But it’s so much worse to continue to put something out there—to ask my team to put something out there—that isn’t the best we can do. I’m going to take this hit, and the only way I can prove all the negative reactions wrong is to come back with a plan that will rock people.”
How they spend their fortune
Even though the couple have just bought a four-bedroom property near Wrexham football club worth around £1.5 million, they spend most of their time at their 4,753 sq ft, seven-bedroom, £4 million mansion in the celebrity-packed town of Bedford, New York state. Here they live with their four kids — James, eight, Inez, six, Betty, three, and a newborn baby, whose name and gender are yet to be revealed — and are neighbours with the likes of Catherine Zeta-Jones, Bruce Willis and Matt Damon.
Alongside their glamorous jet-setting lifestyle (Lively most recently shared vacation pics from a non-disclosed beach on Instagram), Reynolds reportedly has a fetish for sports cars. According to Hot Cars, they own at least 20 rides, including a Cadillac Escalade, Lamborghini Aventador, Mercedes-Benz 190 SL, a modernised Dodge Challenger, Chevrolet Equinox, and many bikes, like the Ducati GT1000.
The couple also donate a large chunk of their wealth to charity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they donated $100,000 (£80,000) each to four New York hospitals and 30 per cent of proceeds from Aviation Gin to aid unemployed bartenders in the US, Canada, and the UK.
A year later, they also donated $1 million (£803,000) to the American Civil Liberties Union and NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and have matched donations of up to $1 million for displaced families in Ukraine.
