BLAKE AND RYAN’S FAIRYTALE
HOLLYWOOD’S FAVOURITE COUPLE SPILL THEIR SECRETS FOR A HAPPY MARRIAGE
Adecade ago, Ryan Reynolds met Blake Lively when the pair played love interests in the 2011 superhero flick Green Lantern. At the time, Reynolds’ marriage to Scarlett Johansson was on its last legs, and Lively was in a relationship with her Gossip Girl co-star Penn Badgley. The movie was a box office flop and copped abysmal reviews, but from that film grew an enduring love story worthy of a rom-com. “We’ve been together almost 10 years,” Reynolds boasted on the July 19 episode of the SmartLess podcast. “That’s, like, 45 years in Hollywood terms.”
In the same conversation, Reynolds, 44, recalled how he and Lively were “friends and buddies” before sparks first flew, saying, “about a year and a half later we went on a double date, but we were dating separate people”. Reynolds then admitted he was the one who made the first move. “Next thing you know, she was going to Boston, I was going to Boston and I said, ‘Well, I’ll ride with you.’ We got on the train and we rode together,” he said. “I was just begging her to sleep with me.” When asked how quickly they went from dating to knowing they wanted a more lasting commitment, Reynolds described it as something “like out of a fairytale … a week later I was like, ‘We should buy a house together,’” he said. “And we did.”
It was their foundation in friendship that sealed the deal for Lively, 33. “That was the biggest thing to me,” she told Marie Claire in 2016. “I’d never known anything like the friendship that I had with him. I could like him as much as I loved him.”
Before they marked their first anniversary as a couple, Reynolds had popped the question with an estimated 12-carat oval-cut Lorraine Schwartz engagement ring. In September 2012, the couple said “I do” at a Martha Stewart-styled wedding in front of 35 guests in South Carolina.
In addition to friendship, family has been key to what makes the couple tick. After once joking she’d happily “spit out a litter of kids”, the pair have welcomed daughters James, 6, Inez, 4, and Betty, 21 months. “If I could have nine daughters, I would be thrilled,” Reynolds told WHO’s sister publication People magazine in 2016. “Really, like I genuinely would be.”
Apart from frequently trolling each other on social media (“My forever valentine for the foreseeable future,” Reynolds wrote of his wife in February), the pair tend to keep their private life out of the public eye. In March 2018, Reynolds laughed off rumours the couple were living separate lives. “I wish,” he replied on Twitter. “I could use a little ‘me-time.’”
To keep a work-life balance, the A-list actors have made a pact not to work at the same time. “We travel all over the place and we just all go together,” he explained in November 2020. “I think that’s been the best part of it that we really don’t spend a lot of time apart. I get to spend a lot of time with my girls.”
The family unit got even closer during the months they spent bunkered down at their home in the swanky neighbourhood of Westchester County, New York, amid the COVID-19 crisis. “It really does vacillate between deep, beautiful connection and then suddenly it’s the third act of Aliens,” Reynolds told The Tonight Show in July 2020. “It changes on a dime.” One thing the couple can count on is laughs. “All day long we joke around with each other,” says Lively. “Because that’s my best friend.”
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“A week later I was like, ‘We should buy a house together.’ And we did” — REYNOLDS