Ryan Reynolds hospitalization came after the actor made the safe choice and still ended up paying for someone else’s reckless one.
In a June 9 GQ video with his Welcome to Wrexham costar Rob Mac, Reynolds said he spent four weeks in the hospital in the 1990s after he was hit by a drunk driver when he was 18.
What Ryan Reynolds said happened that night
Reynolds, now 49, described leaving a bar after having a beer and deciding not to drive home, even though the trip was only a short distance.
“When I was 18, I left a bar and I'd had a beer,” Reynolds said. “I walked back and I looked at my car for a second. I thought, ‘You know what, I'm not going to drive anywhere. Even if it's four blocks home, absolutely not.’”
It was, as he put it, a “firmly positive and wise decision.” Unfortunately, traffic safety takes more than one person making the right call.
“Instead, I turned around, started to cross the street,” he recalled, “and I was run over by a drunk driver.”
Reynolds said the impact left him with devastating injuries.
“I broke every bone in my left side,” he said, adding, “He hit me so hard, his car was not operational.”
The injury left him in hospital for weeks
The Deadpool star said the crash led to a four-week hospital stay. It was not the first time he had spoken publicly about how severe the accident was.
In a 2011 interview with CTV News, cited by New York Daily News, Reynolds said he woke up three days after the collision to find his late father, James Reynolds, sitting in his hospital room with a “vomit tray.”
“I guess I had been heaving in my unconscious,” he said at the time. “And nothing says love like painting someone with three-day-old Gin Rummies. Just soaked the man head to toe in my vomit.”
It’s a very Ryan Reynolds way to tell a grim story: bleak detail first, bodily-fluid punchline second. Under the joke, though, is the fact that he was unconscious for days and badly injured as a teenager.
Reynolds has said the crash stayed with him physically. “I’ve been a rickety, broken mess,” he said.
Why the story lands differently now
Reynolds has built much of his screen persona around quick timing, physical comedy and action, especially through the Deadpool films. Hearing him describe a life-altering accident from his teens adds a sharper edge to that work.
He has also continued doing a significant amount of his own physical work onscreen, though with limits. In a 2022 interview with Variety, Reynolds explained that he values the physical side of filmmaking.
“I really like physicality in movies,” he said. “I think it’s important to do as much of it yourself as you can. But I’ll step aside when there’s something that’s just too gnarly and there’s a trained professional ready to go.”
That caution has increased with age, he said, because bodies tend to become less interested in proving a point.
“You’re not allowed to eat Advil like cereal,” Reynolds quipped. “Things start to hurt. After I turned 35, being thrown onto cement wasn’t hilarious anymore. It had been upgraded to hell.”
Reynolds continues to balance work and family
Beyond his work in film and television, Reynolds is also a father of four. He shares children James, 11, Inez, 9, Betty, 6, and Olin, 3, with his wife, Blake Lively.
The story he told in the GQ video does not play like a neat lesson, because real life rarely arranges itself that politely. Reynolds made the responsible decision not to drive after drinking and was still seriously hurt by someone who did.
That contrast is what makes the account stick. It’s not just a celebrity injury anecdote from the archive. It is a reminder that one bad decision behind the wheel can rewrite someone else’s life in seconds, even when that person did everything right.
