The Night Ryan Reynolds Made the Right Call—and Got Hit Anyway

There’s a particular kind of cosmic irony in Ryan Reynolds’story about the night a drunk driver changed his life. At 18, the future Deadpool actor made exactly the responsible choice—he’d had a beer, looked at his car parked outside the bar, and decided absolutely not to drive, not even four blocks home. So he turned around to walk across the street instead. That’s when a drunk driver hit him.

The accident broke every bone on his left side. Reynolds spent four weeks hospitalized in Vancouver, his body essentially rebuilt by Dr. Meek at the General Hospital. He woke up three days later to find his late father, James Reynolds, sitting vigil with a vomit tray—a detail Reynolds recounted with characteristic humor in a 2011 CTV News interview, joking that he’d thoroughly baptized his dad in three-day-old gin while unconscious.

What makes Reynolds bring this story up now, more than 30 years later in a recent GQ interview published on Wednesday, June 10, isn’t just the shock value or the dark comedy he mines from it. It’s the lesson embedded in the wreckage. When asked what he’s learned from things that didn’t go as planned, Reynolds leaned into philosophy:“Nothing ever goes how you plan, I think, right? It’s the old Chinese proverb, who knows what’s good or bad?”He’s joked since that he’s been“a rickety, broken mess”ever since, but the evidence suggests otherwise.

By the time of the crash, Reynolds had already appeared on the teen drama Hillside and the fantasy series The Odyssey. But what came after tells a different story entirely—one of major hit films including the Deadpool franchise, The Proposal, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, and Red Notice. In 2012, he married actress Blake Lively. They now have four kids together: James (11), Inez (9), Betty (6), and Olin (3).

The real takeaway here isn’t that everything works out fine if you’re destined for Hollywood success. It’s that Reynolds refuses to treat his trauma as a defining tragedy. Instead, he’s reframed it as evidence that life doesn’t follow a script—and that’s okay. You can make the right decision and still get hit by someone else’s bad one. You can be broken and still build something meaningful. That’s not luck. That’s resilience.