Ryan Reynolds, from Hollywood star to successful businessman

In October 2021, Ryan Reynolds announced on his social media that he would be taking a sabbatical. The Canadian Hollywood actor made the news after releasing Spirited, a comedy with Will Ferrell and Octavia Spencer for Apple, which was a disappointing failure for critics. Reynolds was putting his career in the industry on hold, but at the same time he was doubling down on his successful venture as an investor and entrepreneur. For the past couple of years, the star, who is preparing the third Deadpool installment, has been linked to European soccer, the sale of Aviation gin to Diageo for $600 million, telecommunications and even Formula 1. All these operations have made him one of the few movie stars with a solid talent for business.

Reynolds (Vancouver, Canada, 46 years old) recently revealed that he is part of a group of investors who have taken control of 24% of Alpine Racing, Renault’s Formula 1 team, now controlled by the Liberty Media conglomerate. The deal, valued at $218 million, was done alongside private funds RedBird Capital, which has stakes in Liverpool and AC Milan, and Otro Capital. The deal comes after the team posted its best financial year since 2017 in 2021. That year, the car team earned €33 million in a period that coincided with Fernando Alonso behind the wheel.

Reynolds is the youngest of four children born to a sales clerk and a member of the Canadian Mounted Police. In his investment role, the movie star is not alone. He is accompanied by his friend and business partner Rob McElhenney, the American actor and creator of the comedy It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Michael B. Jordan, the star of Creed, the Rocky spin-off. The trio manage Maximum Effort, the production company founded in 2018 and whose name was inspired by one of the phrases most repeated by the irreverent superhero Deadpool.

Both Reynolds and McElhenney have also tried their luck in the world of European soccer, now plagued by petrodollars. At the end of 2020, they bought the modest Welsh club Wrexham, a fifth division team of the English league. They saw in it a potential Cinderella who could become a princess. And they were right. If the Hollywood experience has taught them anything, it is that nothing pleases the public more than a good success story: last April, the team achieved the dream and next season will play in the English third division for the first time in 15 years.

The experience with Wrexham, a club in a town of 135,000 people, is one way to understand Reynolds’ philosophy. It is difficult, even for the most passionate soccer fan, to know the history of a team that lives far away from the big Premiership clubs. However, with the arrival of the Hollywood star, the club has become an international brand. The Welsh now have, for example, a documentary series on FX called Welcome to Wrexham. Their players wear United Airline advertising on their shirts and have just signed HP, while their rivals advertise van companies or small local businesses. King Charles III visited the club’s camp in December to see the phenomenon firsthand. The monarch highlighted their attempt to popularize the Wrexham name.

During an April interview, a Bloomberg reporter inquired about the actor’s insights as an investor. In response, he emphasized the importance of personally investing and having an emotional stake in the game. Although he admitted not being a financial expert, he highlighted that his company, Maximum Effort, excels at understanding and managing such emotional investments effectively. Just before this interview, Reynolds had announced his venture into the fintech sector, a completely new domain for him. He decided to invest in Nuvei, a Montreal-based digital payments company with a global presence in 47 countries. The exact amount of his investment in the company was not disclosed publicly.

With 49 million followers on Instagram alone, Reynolds knows well the power of marketing. That’s one of the main strengths of his company, which is run by George Dewey, the promotional executive for the first Deadpool installment. Social media has given him direct access to consumers. From his platforms, the actor identifies the brands with which he is associated the freshness and sense of humor that have made him a star. This facilitates the virality of campaigns and distinguishes him from other celebrities who lend their image to a product.

The company launched an ad in January for Mint Mobile, the low-cost cell phone company in which it had a significant stake. The idea was simple. Reynolds looks into the camera and announces that the script for the ad was written by ChatGPT. All he asked the artificial intelligence to do was to mention its current promotion to differentiate itself from the big phone companies, to include a joke and to introduce a swear word into the formula, one of the comic actor’s hallmarks. The video had close to two million views on YouTube and fulfilled what the actor and producer demands of Maximum Effort, a quick reaction capacity to write, record, edit and quickly launch an ad on topics that people have in mind.

Last March, T-Mobile, a major U.S. phone company, announced that it was taking over Mint, which offered some of the cheapest plans without having a single store in the country and in which Reynolds owned a 25% stake. The company had grown 50% in customers and 70% in revenue over the past four years with fresh styling. The deal closed at $1.35 billion, 39% in cash and 61% in stock. The actor won around $300 million for his shares. Reynolds and Mint fans were none too pleased with the big fish eating the little fish after several years of back-and-forth marketing campaigns. In a company ad, Satan was hired as a customer service manager for a large telephone company. Fans were reassured when the message confirming the transaction was made public. Mike Sievert, T-Mobile’s CEO, thanked Reynolds and his team while announcing that they will keep the popular $15/month plan. To which Reynolds quipped, “And T-Mobile has assured me that our incredibly improvised, and borderline reckless, messaging strategy will also remain untouched.”

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