Ryan Reynolds is riding a career high off the back of the huge success of his third Deadpool movie, Deadpool & Wolverine, which just so happens to be the second superhero flick he's starred in alongside wife Blake Lively.
The famous couple first met on the set of the Green Lantern movie way back in 2010 and announced they were an item the very next year.
It sounds like the perfect Hollywood love story at first, but Reynolds was actually married to another A-list star when he met Lively: Marvel darling Scarlett Johansson.
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Their divorce was finalised just a few months before Reynolds and Lively went public with their romance, and it wasn't the first time the Deadpool actor moved on quickly.
Prior to marrying Johansson, Reynolds dated and was even engaged to iconic (or should we say Ironic) '90s singer Alanis Morissette, but he got with Johansson very soon after they called it quits.
Keep reading to dive into Reynolds' dating history and how he went from walking red carpets with one hugely famous woman to another.
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Alanis Morissette, 2002 - 2007
Canadian actor Reynolds reportedly met Canadian singer Morissette through famous mutual friend Drew Barrymore in 2002, when they both attended her birthday party.
The pair bonded over their shared background and started dating soon after.
"We already started off with the shorthand, so I think it's a really great base. I attempted dating many American men. I tried!" Morissette told People in 2005.
In 2003, the couple made plenty of red carpet appearances together and the following year Reynolds got down on one knee and popped the question. She said yes.
"He's just such a supportive creature. I feel so loved by him, in a trampoline kind of way. He's always very happy for me," Morissette said of her fiance a year later.
Unfortunately, that love didn't last.
The pair reportedly split for a while in 2006, then got back together, only to call it quits for real in February 2007 when representatives for both stars confirmed their romance was over.
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"They remain close friends and continue to have the utmost love and admiration for each other," reps said in a statement, via People.
Reynolds avoided speaking about the split publicly, while Morissette channelled her "grief" into music for her 2008 album Flavors of Entanglement.
The song Torch is rumoured to be about her split from Reynolds, and she swore off high-profile public romances in the future.
"I was a full-blown love addict, so it was like, 'I can't keep doing this, my body can't take it.' For someone who is a love addict, [breakups are] debilitating," she told Entertainment Weekly in May, 2008.
But by that time, Reynolds had well and truly moved on ... in fact, he was already engaged again.
Scarlett Johansson, 2007 - 2010
It's unclear when Reynolds first met American actress Johansson, but the pair were publicly dating as early as April 2007.
Unlike with Morissette, Reynolds tried to keep his relationship with the Black Widow actress a little more private, so many fans were surprised when the couple announced their engagement in May 2008.
"They're both thrilled," Johansson's rep told People.
She and Reynolds tied the knot just a few months later at a wilderness retreat in Vancouver Island, Canada with just a handful of close friends and family in attendance.
Less than a year later, cracks were starting to show in their Hollywood marriage.
"We work and then go home and – I, anyway – just stare at the wall for a few hours before I go to sleep," Johansson told Time Out New York in December, 2009.
"Like in any profession, it's difficult. You want to make sure you have time to invest in your family. It's a challenge, but it's worth it."
There were also rumours that Reynolds felt threatened by his first wife's more successful acting career.
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Johansson was one of the highest-paid actresses in the world in 2009 and was racking up one award nomination after the next, while Reynolds' career was still on the rise.
Years later, Johansson seemed to hint at that disparity creating tension in the relationship.
"Acting is a very strange world to be co-existing in. It's very volatile. There's always going to be the more successful person," she told Parade in 2015.
"[Marriage] takes a lot of work. It takes a man who's not only confident in the love that you have for one another, but confident in what he has going on in his own career."
In December 2010, she and Reynolds announced their separation with a joint statement where they both claimed to be leaving the marriage with "love and kindness".
There were rumours that infidelity had played a role in their split, but Reynolds appeared to debunk those claims in May, 2011, just two months before their divorce was finalised.
"The media was not invited to my marriage, and they're definitely not invited into the divorce," he told Details magazine, via Today. "There was no story and no scandal."
In that very same interview, the actor said he didn't think he'd ever want to get married again.
Just 16 months later, he was married again.
Blake Lively, 2011 - present
Reynolds met his current wife Lively while filming Green Lantern in 2010, where she played his on-screen love interest.
He was still married to Johanssen at the time but the second they announced their split in December that year, rumours started swirling that Lively had something to do with it.
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Tabloids published wild claims that the co-stars had an affair that spelled the end of Reynolds' first marriage, but there was no evidence to back up the cheating rumours.
Officially, Reynolds and Lively didn't start dating until October, 2011 - three months after his divorce from Johansson was finalised.
"We were friends and buddies and about a year and a half later we went on a double date, but we were dating separate people," Reynolds said on the SmartLess podcast.
Eventually they connected romantically, the actor saying in 2021: "We always kind of kept in touch but sort of casually. And then next thing you know, she was going to Boston. I was going to Boston. So I was like, 'I'll ride with you.'"
The rest is history.
Reynolds and Lively's romance moved quickly and on September 9, 2012, they wed at a historic plantation in South Carolina (they later apologised for their choice of venue due to its harrowing association with slavery).
Two years after tying the knot, Reynolds and Lively welcomed their first child and at the time of writing they have four kids together; daughters James, born 2016, Inez, born 2016, Betty, born 2019, and son Olin, born 2023.
Both of them had hoped for a big family, Reynolds revealed to Details in 2013.
"We both come from big families – my parents did four, Blake's did five. A lot of people say it's crazy, but ... we'll walk through that fire pretty happily, I think."
The couple value their privacy and that of their children, so they generally keep details of their relationship and family life private these days.
"Ryan had a nice, normal upbringing, and we want our kids to have the same normal life that we had," Lively once told Marie Claire.
"We don't ever want to rob them of what we had because then we'd feel really selfish. All my eggs are in one basket, and that's my family."
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Title: Ryan Reynolds' dating history: His three biggest romances with A-list stars all seemed to overlap
Sourced From: celebrity.nine.com.au/latest/ryan-reynolds-dating-history-relationships-explainer/c82cfade-7d68-4c0d-bf63-b6bd7e78fe2e
Published Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2024 02:08:00 GMT
