It’s been more than 30 years since Ryan Reynolds was struck by a drunk driver, but he still vividly remembers the harrowing incident.
“You know, when I was 18, I left a bar and I’d had a beer, you know, and I walked back and I looked at my car for a second, I thought, ‘You know what? I’m not gonna drive anywhere,’” Reynolds, now 49, told Rob Mac during a video interview for GQ published on Wednesday, June 10.
“‘Even if it’s four blocks home, absolutely not.’ And so instead, I turned around, started to cross the street, and I was run over by a drunk driver,” the Deadpool actor recalled of the accident, which took place in his native Vancouver. “I got run over by a drunk driver after making a firmly positive and wise decision for a young 18-year-old male.”
Reynolds recalled spending “four weeks in the hospital” because the collision “broke every bone in [his] left side.”
“He hit me so hard, his car was not operational,” he added.
Reynolds then joked, “I’d like to thank Dr. Meek at the General Hospital for putting me back together so kindly. Socialized medicine, he couldn’t say no.”
Taking advantage of the discussion topic, the interviewer asked Reynolds, “What is the best lesson you’ve learned from something that didn’t go how you planned?”
The Free Guy star responded, “Nothing ever goes how you plan, I think, right? It’s the old Chinese proverb, who knows what’s good or bad?”
Reynolds previously spoke about the accident and its aftermath in a 2011 interview with CTV News.
“I woke up three days later,” Reynolds recalled, adding that his late dad, James Reynolds, was sitting in his hospital room with a “vomit tray.”
“I guess I had been heaving in my unconscious,” he explained. “And nothing says love like painting someone with three-day-old Gin Rummies. Just soaked the man head to toe in my vomit.”
Reynolds joked that he hasn’t been the same since the incident. “I’ve been a rickety, broken mess,” he said.
All things considered, Reynolds’ life and career turned out to be quite successful after that fateful night. The actor, who had already appeared on a season of the teen drama Hillside (a.k.a. Fifteen) and the fantasy series The Odyssey by the time of the crash, went on to star in major hit films including the Deadpool franchise, The Proposal (2009), The Hitman’s Bodyguard (2017), Red Notice (2021) and more.
On the personal side, Reynolds married actress Blake Lively in 2012. The two are now parents to kids James, 11, Inez, 9, Betty, 6, and Olin, 3.
