How tall is Ryan Reynolds?

How tall is Ryan Reynolds?

The site lists Ryan Reynolds at 188 cm (6′2″). That figure is recorded on his Wikidata entry, where it is referenced to his IMDb biography, and it is the height most commonly given for him in entertainment coverage. Unlike athletes, actors are not measured by a league or governing body, so the number comes from industry listings rather than an official measurement. In Reynolds's case it is consistent with how he appears next to co-stars whose heights are well documented, including Hugh Jackman, Dwayne Johnson and Will Ferrell.

At 6′2″, Reynolds is tall by any everyday standard and slightly above average for a Hollywood leading man, a group that skews taller than the general population. He has rarely made his own height a talking point. Most discussion of it comes from fans comparing him with co-stars, especially since Deadpool & Wolverine put him side by side with Jackman for an entire film.

From Vancouver to Hollywood

Ryan Rodney Reynolds was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, on October 23, 1976. His father, James Chester Reynolds, served in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police before working as a food wholesaler, and his mother, Tamara Lee, worked in retail. He is the youngest of four brothers and has described himself as a "moving target" for his older siblings, a self-deprecating line typical of his humor. He grew up in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighborhood and attended Kitsilano Secondary School.

He started acting at 13, with a lead role in the Canadian teen soap Hillside (1991–1993), and later moved to Los Angeles. His breakthrough came through the sitcom Two Guys and a Girl and comedies such as Van Wilder (2002), followed by romantic comedies, action roles and eventually superhero films.

Starting on screen at 13 also means Reynolds, like many child actors, did much of his growing during his early television work. Hillside ran from 1991 to 1993, when he was roughly 14 to 16, the years when boys typically go through their fastest growth. No reliable source has published his brothers' or parents' heights, so the site does not speculate on whether his height runs in the family.

Height and the superhero years

Reynolds has played several comic-book characters, and his height has suited the genre's preference for tall, imposing leads. He appeared in Blade: Trinity (2004), first played Wade Wilson in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) and starred as Hal Jordan in Green Lantern (2011), before Deadpool (2016) became the role that defined his career.

The superhero genre has a complicated relationship with height. Comic-book characters often have official heights in Marvel and DC handbooks, and casting rarely follows them closely. The site's character data shows some examples:

The Wolverine row is the most famous mismatch in superhero casting: Jackman is about 30 cm taller than the comic-book character he played for more than two decades. Reynolds, at 188 cm, is very close to the size most fans picture for Deadpool, a character usually drawn as a tall, lean mercenary.

Deadpool & Wolverine: two tall leads

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) paired Reynolds and Jackman as co-leads for the first time since 2009. It was the first R-rated film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Box Office Mojo records a worldwide gross of about $1.338 billion. Its Wikipedia article, citing box-office trackers, describes it as the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time and the second-highest-grossing film of 2024.

For height fans, the film is notable because its two leads are almost the same size. The site lists Jackman at 190.5 cm and Reynolds at 188 cm, a gap of just 2.5 cm (one inch). In fight scenes and the many two-shots of the pair arguing, they read as near-equals. That's a striking contrast with the comics, where a 160 cm Wolverine standing next to a 6′2″ Deadpool would look up at his partner by more than a foot.

The same month, Reynolds's wife Blake Lively led the box office with It Ends with Us, and his Wikipedia biography notes they became the first married Hollywood couple since Bruce Willis and Demi Moore in 1990 to have separate films top the box office on the same weekend.

Ryan Reynolds next to his co-stars

Reynolds has worked with a wide range of actors, and the height gaps vary a lot. The table uses the site's data.

Romantic comedies and action-comedies

Before Deadpool, Reynolds was best known for romantic comedies, a genre where the height relationship between the leads is part of the visual language. In The Proposal (2009), Sandra Bullock, listed at 171 cm, plays his demanding boss, and the 17 cm height gap works against the power dynamic of the story: he is the assistant, but he towers over her. In Free Guy (2021), he starred opposite Jodie Comer, listed at 173 cm, a gap of 15 cm. In The Adam Project (2022), he shared scenes with Mark Ruffalo (173 cm) and Jennifer Garner (171 cm), both about 15 to 17 cm shorter.

Those numbers show something consistent about his casting. Across two decades of leading roles, Reynolds has usually been the tallest or second-tallest person in the main cast. That is common for leading men in Hollywood, where casting directors have historically favored tall male leads, but it also means the films where he is outsized, like Red Notice, stand out.

Red Notice and Spirited: when Reynolds is the shorter lead

In most of his films, Reynolds is the taller actor in the frame. Red Notice and Spirited are exceptions. In Red Notice, Dwayne Johnson is about 7.6 cm (3 inches) taller, and the film's heist-comedy dynamic often plays the two as physical opposites: Johnson's bulk against Reynolds's quick talk. In Spirited, the musical Christmas comedy, Will Ferrell is listed at 191 cm, about an inch taller, so the two leads look evenly matched in their dance numbers.

Josh Brolin and Cable

In Deadpool 2, Josh Brolin played Cable, a character the comics depict as a huge soldier from the future. Brolin is listed at 178 cm, about 10 cm shorter than Reynolds, so the film used costume, camera angles and staging to make Cable look imposing next to Deadpool. It is a good example of how film productions treat height as something to design: a shorter actor playing a towering character opposite a taller lead.

You can compare Reynolds with any of these actors at true scale using the height difference calculator.

Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively

Reynolds married Blake Lively in 2012, and the couple has four children. The site lists Lively at 178 cm (5′10″), making her one of the taller actresses in Hollywood and about 10 cm (4 inches) shorter than her husband.

That gap is a useful example of what research on couple heights has found. In a 2013 study in PLoS ONE, Gert Stulp and colleagues compared the height differences of real couples in the UK's Millennium Cohort Study with simulations of random pairing. They found evidence for a "male-taller norm," meaning couples where the man was shorter occurred less often than chance would predict, and for a "male-not-too-tall norm," with couples where the man was more than 25 cm taller also less common than expected. They also found that taller women tend to have smaller height differences with their partners, while shorter women tend to have larger ones, although the effects were modest.

The same study measured a modest tendency for tall people to pair with tall people, a correlation of about 0.18 between partners' heights. Reynolds and Lively fit those patterns neatly. Lively is well above the average height for women, and the gap of about 10 cm between them is smaller than the gap many shorter women have with their partners, yet the man is still the taller of the two.

Reynolds was previously married to Scarlett Johansson, from 2008 to 2011. The site lists Johansson at 160 cm, about 28 cm (11 inches) shorter than Reynolds.

Compared with the average Canadian and American man

Reynolds was born in Canada and is a citizen of both Canada and the United States. NCD-RisC estimates for Canada put men born in 1976, his birth year, at an average of 177.1 cm. The equivalent figure for the United States is 177.5 cm.

The CDC's NHANES measurements give a sharper picture. American men aged 40 to 49 in the 2015–2018 survey, the age group Reynolds was in at the time, had a mean height of 176.3 cm and a 95th percentile of 188.4 cm. At 188 cm, Reynolds is right at the 95th percentile, meaning roughly 19 in 20 men his age are shorter.

Canadian men have grown taller over the last century, from 170.7 cm for the 1896 birth cohort to 177.1 cm for the 1976 cohort, according to NCD-RisC, though the pace has slowed sharply for recent generations, as in the United States. You can see where any height falls in the distribution with the height percentile calculator.

Wrexham and a different kind of stage

In 2021, Reynolds and fellow actor Rob McElhenney took over the Welsh football club Wrexham, a story documented in the Emmy-winning series Welcome to Wrexham. Football is a sport where height varies widely by position: goalkeepers and center-backs tend to be among the tallest players on a team, while wingers and attacking midfielders are often much shorter. At 188 cm, Reynolds would not look out of place among a club's goalkeepers. Next to his co-owner Rob McElhenney, he is generally the taller of the two in photos, although the site does not yet hold a verified height for McElhenney, so it does not put a number on the gap. Many of the photos of him at the Racecourse Ground show him standing alongside players, and in those he generally looks in line with the squad's taller members.

What 188 cm looks like

At 188 cm, Reynolds is the same height as Elon Musk and NBA guards Stephen Curry and Kyrie Irving in the site's data, and a little taller than actors such as Chris Evans and Harry Styles. He is also exactly level with Morgan Freeman, who appeared alongside him in The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard and is listed at the same 188 cm, so in their scenes together neither actor needed any staging to match the other. He is about an inch shorter than Hugh Jackman and Will Ferrell, and about three inches shorter than Dwayne Johnson.

To build your own lineup with Reynolds and his co-stars, use the main height comparison tool, or browse other actors on the celebrity heights hub.