Summary
- Detective Pikachu was a unique voice acting role for Reynolds, showcasing his versatility beyond live-action films.
- Fireflies in the Garden was a forgotten drama where Reynolds explored a different side of his acting talents.
- Reynolds’ supporting role in Mississippi Grind added depth to the comedy, emphasizing the dangers of addiction.
It seems like Ryan Reynolds is everywhere in modern cinema, but it’s easy to forget that he’s been omnipresent in movies for a long time now. The Canadian-born actor has made a name for himself as one of the most reliable stars in Hollywood, leveraging his charisma in lead roles in films like Free Guy and Deadpool. Ryan Reynold’s best movies may be quite well-known by now, but his presence of film sets goes far beyond easy-to-remember blockbusters.
There are several factors that can easily mask the presence of a star as well-known as Ryan Reynolds. Sometimes, a given film is simply too obscure or early in his career to be known to most people, let alone remembered as a role. Other times, Reynolds can sneak into the casts of animated films in a surprising voice acting performance, his cadence not always being immediately obvious. In any case, Reynolds is more than capable of sneaking his way into characters that don’t always come to mind when reciting his expansive filmography.
10 Detective Pikachu
Reynold’s most popular forgotten role
Voice acting is a tricky thing, as it can be more difficult to leverage a famous movie star’s marquee value through the lense of an animated character. However, Detective Pikachu was able to do just that, casting Reynolds in the role of everyone’s favorite sentient Pokémon. In the film, Reynolds plays a detective who is turned into a Pikachu by an insidious villain, racing to uncover a deadly plot before it’s too late with the help of his new friend, a failed trainer who is the only one who can understand his speech.
It turns out that Detective Pikachu is actually the boy’s long-lost father, and as much is revealed when Ryan Reynolds appears in human form towards the end of the film. Being an animated character realistic enough to feasibly exist alongside live-action people, it’s easy to forget that Reynolds voices the wisecracking electric rodent. Even if the film was able to break the infamous video game movie curse, being wildly popular at the time of its release, it seems to have left a small pop culture footprint in years since.
9 Fireflies In The Garden
An entirely forgettable drama
It’s rare for Ryan Reynolds to star in a straight-laced drama, and perhaps Fireflies in the Garden is the reason why. Alongside a star-studded cast, the film tells the quiet story of a family throughout the ages as they deal with a sudden death. To compliment the low stakes, the film makes heavy use of flashback and interwoven, anachronistic scenes that hop back and forth between older and younger versions of the same character.
The film pits his feelings of how he was raised against his thoughts on bringing up a son himself, with Micheal becoming an expectant father towards the end of the film.
Reynolds plays Michael, the up-and-coming author with a strained relationship with his father, played by Willem Dafoe. The film pits his feelings of how he was raised against his thoughts on bringing up a son himself, with Micheal becoming an expectant father towards the end of the film. Despite it’s phenomenal cast, Fireflies in the Garden‘s melodrama wasn’t able to impress critics at the time of its release, dooming it to obscurity, Ryan Reynolds or otherwise.
8 Mississippi Grind
A contemplative comedy with Reynolds in a supporting role
Known primarily for his talented ad-lib ability and impeccable joke timing, it’s no surprise that the majority of Ryan Reynolds’ forgotten roles are comedies. Mississippi Grind is an often-overlooked A24 movie featuring Ben Mendelsohn as a down-on-his-luck gambler desperate to hit it big after a series of financially devastating failures. The resulting string of messy games of chance impact his life in a variety of ways, including his relationship with co-lead Ryan Reynolds.
Reynolds plays Curtis, a younger, upstart gambler who forms a friendship with Mendelsohn’s Gerry. Reynolds is responsible for much of the film’s most memorable jokes, to no one’s surprise, and just might be the only thing keeping Missippi Grind from being a more straightforward drama. A critically-lauded tale about the dangers of addiction, Mississippi Grind is an under-appreciated recent stop in Reynolds’ star-studded career.
7 Waiting
A raunchy workplace comedy with Reynolds as the film’s face
As Office Space did to white-collar workers, so too did Waiting represent the woes of employment in the food service industry. The film follows a largely silent new initiate to the crew of a family restaurant called “Shenanigans’”, only to come face-to-face with the inane realities of life as a waiter. Reynolds stars as Monty, an early archetypal Ryan Reynolds role who spends most of his time at work goofing off, firing off painful quips, and pursuing women of questionable age.
Reynolds manages to be effortlessly funny in this role while truly exemplifying just how annoying and downright heinous a co-worker with this kind of personality would be in real life. He more than earns the verbal lashing he receives at the hands of viewpoint character Mitch along with the rest of the Shenanigans’ staff, sarcastically calling him “t he coolest ****ing guy at Shenanigans“. With how beloved films like Office Space are, it’s surprising that Reynolds’ appearance in Waiting isn’t better known.
6 Blade: Trinity
Reynolds’ first tango with the superhero genre
Long before Green Lantern or Deadpool ever fired out of projectors at theaters across the world, Ryan Reynolds had a far more forgettable brush with the world of superheroes in Blade: Trinity. The final film in the Blade trilogy, Trinity brought Reynolds into the fold as a vampire hunter named Hannibal King, essentially a prototypical version of Deadpool. Blade: Trinity reaches neither the heights of the Deadpool movies’ quality nor the lows of Green Lantern‘s infamy, simply being forgettably bad.
Luckily, the two seem to have buried the hatchet as of Blade’s
cameo in
Deadpool & Wolverine
, in which he tells the more recent Reynolds Marvel character ”
I don’t like you
.”
Notably, Blade actor Wesley Snipes wasn’t a fan of Reynolds on-set, with no small amount of friction being generated between the two movie stars. Luckily, the two seem to have buried the hatchet as of Blade’s cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine, in which he tells the more recent Reynolds Marvel character “I don’t like you.” Deadpool simply responds “You never did“, causing audiences to remember Blade: Trinity for the first time in two decades.
5 Boltneck
Might be one of Reynolds’ most obscure releases ever
With only a limited-time run in theaters back in 1998, Boltneck might be one of the single most obscure films to star Ryan Reynolds ever released. Surprisingly, Reynolds is tasked with the charge of playing Frankenstein’s monster, or at least, a hunky modern version of him, in this ultra-low-budget horror comedy. Here, a teen version of Frankenstein literally named Frank Stein reanimates his deceased classmate after a tragic death.
The catch? He wasn’t able to salvage the original brain, using a mystery replacement instead.
The brain in question turns out to have belonged to a vicious serial killer, whose personality slowly manifests in Reynolds’ character. This awkward early performance by the beloved movie star doesn’t leave much to praise, outside of being a passing rip-off of John Hughes’ Weird Science. It’s no wonder this particular point of Reynolds’ career fell by the wayside in the minds of many.
4 The Croods
Free Guy wasn’t the only time Reynolds played a Guy
Detective Pikachu was far from Ryan Reynolds’ only foray into voice acting, and he’s even less recognizable in the paleolithic family film The Croods. Revolving around the titular family of cave-dwelling hominids, The Croods eventually introduces Reynolds’ voice as Guy, a more advanced human creeping past the Stone Age. Guy’s newflangled inventions, like shoes, impress the teen Crood daughter, Eep, while alienating the patriarch Grug, played by Nicolas Cage.
Reynolds’ voice as Guy is easy to catch once with prior knowledge, but his hard to guess without seeing the credits first. It’s nice to see Reynolds in a more family-friendly role for a change, not to mention in a role other than the lead. Reynolds returned for the second film, The Croods: A New Age, and can be assured to appear in any planned third entry in the modestly successful franchise.
3 Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle
Reynolds couldn’t be left out of such an irreverent comedy
The debut of Harold and Kumar’s stoner comedy series, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is a quintessentially early-2000s comedy. As such, it would almost seem illegal for the film to leave out Ryan Reynolds from the final credits, manifesting a role for him no matter what. The movie follows two best friends on a simple quest for fast food that goes wildly off-track, such as the scene which introduces Reynolds’ character. While Harold and Kumar go to White Castle isn’t exactly an unkown film, Reynolds’ blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo is easy to forget.
Reynolds plays an O.R. nurse who mistakes Harold and Kumar as surgeons during their attempt to steal medical marijuana from a hospital. Before they know it, the twin leads are scrubbing in for a dangerous surgery on a gunshot victim, with Reynolds’ hilarious dialogue in his brief cameo fueling the dramatic irony. Here, Reynolds manages to recapture some of his chemistry with Kal Penn, who he also acted across in the more famous comedy Van Wilder.
2 Buried
Shows off the technical side of Reynolds’ acting skill
Even though Ryan Reynolds is far more famous for his comedy stylings, the Canadian actor often betrays his ability to deliver genuinely impressive emotional performances. This is exemplified nowhere better than in Buried, a tense bottle movie that takes place almost entirely within the confines of a claustrophobic coffin. Here, Reynolds plays a truck driver who finds himself attacked and buried alive in a wooden coffin, with only a handful of mundane items to fuel his escape.
Like all the best bottle movies, Buried is entirely reliant on the strength of its lone star to succeed. Reynolds manages to deliver possibly the most engaging dramatic performance of his life as he slowly fights off panic, hypoxia, and despair within the cramped set of the tense survival thriller. The mysterious sounds he hears just above the surface only adds fuel to the raging fire of terror the film lights, with only Reynolds’ inherent charm to temporarily stave it off.
1 The Voices
A textbook black comedy with Reynolds at the helm
Buried and Boltneck aren’t Ryan Reynolds’ only experience with horror movies, and the overlooked horror comedy The Voices might be his definitive take on the genre. Once again, Reynolds stars as the villain, though the movie takes place from his perspective. His character, Jerry Hickfang, is a simple factory worker with a dark secret — Debilitating auditory and visual hallucinations plague his every waking moment.
Eventually, the pressure from the titular voices becomes too much and drives Jerry to murder, being provoked to kill again when the ghost of his victim seemingly begs for a companion. Reynolds is able to transplant his trademark levity successfully into such a bleak premise, making for a ghoulishly hilarious black comedy with an incredibly dark sense of humor. With an utterly impossible-to-predict ending and a circus of madness that leads to it, The Voices is a criminally underrated role in Ryan Reynolds‘ impressive collection.
