“Full disclosure: I shot till about 3:30 this morning; slept for an hour and a half until
two of my kids punched me in the face,” says Ryan Reynolds. “So… finding my words may take
a second. Good thing. There’ll be less for you to bleep out.” Apart from being an accomplished
actor and a doting husband and dad, Reynolds is also an entrepreneur. Today, we’re looking
into the actor’s inspiring business ventures, including what, how, and, more importantly, why.
When Reynolds launched his production company, Maximum Effort, in 2018,
he took the unusual step of hiring a marketing exec to run it — George Dewey, with whom he
collaborated on the Deadpool campaign. It soon expanded into marketing after Ryan
became an owner of Aviation Gin and Mint Mobile. “If Ryan had a master plan all along, he did
a great job of hiding it,” Dewey says. “All he’s trying to do is to make things that bring a little
joy, fun or unexpectedness into people’s lives.” While many turn their nose up at it,
he sees art in commerce. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing,” Reynolds says.
“We love storytelling. Marketing, to a certain extent, is diet storytelling.”
As opposed to pitching ideas to a client, Reynolds has Maximum Effort (whose marketing
side later merged with the advertising software company MNTN) coming up with an idea it loves
and then looking for an ideal client for it, much as a production company does.
For example, he wrote a spot where Satan falls in love with 2020, which he brought to Match.com.
It’s a model that prioritizes creativity over profit. “Everything we do is scrappy,” Reynolds
says. “It’s fast, it’s inexpensive, character over spectacle. I think that
you’re capable of much greater things when you’re using fewer resources, you just are.”
Speed and cultural savvy outweigh production value in Maximum Effort,
where the idea is, as Reynolds says, “move at the speed of what people are talking about.”
Remember a Peloton’s 2019 holiday commercial in which a woman unexpectedly receives an exercise
bike from her husband blew up on Twitter? It was early December, and an ad for Peloton,
in which a husband buys one of the company’s $2,000 stationary bikes for his beautiful wife,
had just gone viral — though not in the way Peloton might have hoped.
People immediately started talking about her pained facial expression, alleging that “Peloton
Girl,” as she was nicknamed, was being forced to exercise by her sadistic, thinness-­obsessed
partner. The ad was mocked for being sexist, out of touch, and even a full-on dystopian nightmare.
As the furore peaked, the company’s valuation dropped by a billion dollars, literally overnight.
The ad’s lead actor, Monica Ruiz , was at the centre of all this,
quietly freaking out. She declined several interview requests. But then she received
a call from one of the people on the planet best-suited to help her navigate this situation.
Reynolds had gotten her number from her agent. He asked if she’d reprise the role in an ad for
a spirits company he owns, called Aviation Gin. “I just felt strongly that it would be a bit of
digital judo, that she’d be taking this power back and repurposing it in a different way,” said Ryan.
A few days after Reynolds and Ruiz’s conversation, Peloton Girl was all over Twitter again,
only this time in a spot for Aviation Gin. Ruiz is seen drinking martinis with two friends, who toast
to “new beginnings.” One solemnly promises, “You’re safe here.”
Reynolds posted the spot, which he and Dewey wrote, to his social accounts just
as he took off for Brazil ComicCon. “I hit send, went up in the air, and fell asleep.”
By the time he landed, it had caught fire. The commercial soon racked up 10 million views on
Twitter alone, and was further amplified by Reynolds’s appearance on The Tonight Show a
few days later. In addition, the “where to buy” searches on Aviation’s website spiked
so dramatically that the website-hosting company thought something had gone wrong.
Digital judo appears to be one of Reynolds’s superpowers.
The 45-year-old is also the co­writer and producer of many of his own films,
and — more notably, he is an idea machine with a mischievous sensibility and a knack for timing.
Reynolds’ ads capture the same sardonic humour of Deadpool, of course.
Take a surreal ad for 2018’s Deadpool 2, in which the character, dressed as PBS icon Bob Ross,
struggles to paint a bucolic scene using colours such as “Betty White.”
Or, his years-long “feud” with buddy Hugh Jackman, which they harnessed for a joint
spot for Aviation and Jackman’s Laughing Man Coffee company. Their attempt at
“reconciling” racked up 8 million views. He made fun of every cliché in the luxury
booze brand playbook as he tells of the detailed “holistic” process through which the gin is made,
from workers misting oranges on the tree (with the tears of Aviation’s owner – Reynolds) and
corporate promises of “humanely caught” plants. At the start of the you-know-what, Reynolds put
together an ad to remind people what life used to be like and some fun things, like Aviation,
are still around. He donated 30% of the proceedings to unemployed bartenders.
But Reynolds does more than write witty copy. He believes in “having skin in the game.”
Not only does Ryan create the advertising, but he also has a financial stake in many of
the companies he’s advertising. Which, incidentally, can pay off handsomely.
Aviation American Gin was sold for $610 million within two years of Reynolds’ involvement.
He also has been pioneering a new style of vertically integrated marketing.
His ad agency doesn’t just create content but provides his own channels.
Reynolds has 36 million followers on Instagram and more than 16 million on Twitter, and he is using
social media to extend the advertising message. When brands are desperate to communicate online
that they’re just like us, Ryan actually is just like us. And in an era when traditional
marketing rules no longer apply, his speed and candidness become a distinct advantage.
Last Super Bowl, for example, Reynolds crafted — and spent around $100,000 to place — a full-page
ad in The New York Times for Mint Mobile (a low-cost cellphone provider he bought a stake
in last year. It mocked the 30-second spots his competitors had purchased during the game for
$5 million apiece: “We could literally give away over 300,000 months of free service and still save
money. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.” As he explains it, “There’s something fascinating
to me about creating a piece of content that’s shareable and acknowledges quite nakedly that
it’s an ad. And it’s certainly more honest.” Maximum Effort now has ten employees and offices
in New York and Los Angeles. It is small and lean, with no red tape to cut through
and no bureaucracy to get through. As with his movies, Reynolds keep budgets at modest levels.
He chose the name Maximum Effort for his production company and marketing
agency because it was Deadpool’s catchphrase. It could also be his own.
The actor’s closest collaborators marvel at his willingness to work. Shawn Levy, his director
on Free Guy and The Adam Project, says Reynolds refuses to rest on his superstar status: “His work
ethic is so disproportionate to what he could get away with. The guy hustles nonstop.” Gal Gadot ,
his Red Notice co-star, said: “He gives 200 percent to everything in the most nonchalant way.”
“I tend to bite off way more than I could or should chew,” Ryan says. “I think maybe it’s just
that Canadian sensibility: ‘Well, I said I was going to, so I have to deliver this.’ I will do
that at the cost of my own well-being sometimes.” In late May, near the end of Mental Health
Awareness Month, Reynolds took to social media to share with his tens of millions of followers that
he suffers from anxiety. His “longtime pal,” as he called it, has travelled with him since childhood,
though pressures of his professional life amplified it.
“I fixate on things,” he says. “That’s sort of the engine of anxiety. I lay awake at night,
wrapping and unwrapping every possible scenario. I slept at a perfect right angle for so many years.”
However, he’s actively trying to manage the issue through meditation and a conscious effort to be
mindful. “I tend to pave over anxiety with work and, to a lesser extent, achievement,” he says.
While Ryan says he’d be thrilled to “pull a Betty White” and tell naughty jokes into his 90s, he’s
not counting on it. “I will not be a movie star at some point,” he says. That thinking informs
his planning for the Group Effort Initiative, a diversity and inclusion program funded out of his
salary that gives BIPOC and other marginalized people, historically underrepresented in the
entertainment industry, tangible work experience on his upcoming productions.
“Representation and diversity need to be completely immersive,” Reynolds says. “It
needs to be embedded at the root of storytelling, and that’s in both marketing and Hollywood. When
you add perspective and insight that isn’t your own, you grow. And you grow your company, too.”
Reynolds could easily have followed the well-trodden path of other actors,
such as Ashton Kutcher), who’ve invested in Silicon Valley’s hottest young companies.
“Yeah, but building something is incredibly rewarding,” Reynolds notes.
“Right now, I’m in a position of unspeakable privilege, where I can enact something like this.
At some point, I will not be,” Reynolds says.
“So, the hope is that you’re creating a template so that it becomes sustainable.” After he
introduced the initiative on The Adam Project, several studios and networks adopted the model.
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