Ryan Reynolds Says Blake Lively Grew Up ‘Working Class’
I imagine it hasn’t been a fun year for Blake Lively’s PR team. First, there was the It Ends With Us press tour, during which Lively and co-star Justin Baldoni reportedly came to blows over how the film about domestic violence should be messaged to the public. After Lively used the movie’s premiere as an occasion to promote her new hair-care line and her love of “really crazy rings,” fans of the film then turned on her, calling out the actress’s “nepo baby” status and resulting privilege. Lively, apparently, was “pretty surprised” by the backlash. All the more interesting, then, that her husband, Ryan Reynolds, is currently busy telling The Hollywood Reporter that both he and Lively grew up “working class.”
During a recent interview, Reynolds was asked how he and his wife manage to keep all four of their children — James, Inez, Betty, and Olin — out of the public eye while maintaining high-profile careers.
“We try to give them as normal a life as possible. I try not to impose upon them the difference in their childhood to my childhood or my wife’s childhood,” Reynolds said. “We both grew up very working class, and I remember when they were very young, I used to say or think, like, ‘Oh God, I would never have had a gift like this when I was a kid,’ or, ‘I never would’ve had this luxury of getting takeout,’ or whatever.”
For Reynolds, that might be true: His father, who has since died, was a policeman, while his mother, Tammy, worked as a retail associate. As for Lively? People describes her parents as “Hollywood veterans.” Her late father was an actor and a director, and her mother was an actress and a talent manager. The 37-year-old has publicly discussed growing up on sets, and her father reportedly cast her in a role in the 1998 film Sandman when she was 10 years old. To be fair, it doesn’t sound as though Lively’s family grew up with anywhere near the wealth her kids now enjoy. Still, I can’t help thinking of Victoria Beckham trying to claim that she, too, grew up “working class” — when, really, her dad was driving her to school in the ’80s in a Rolls-Royce. Too bad David Beckham is not around this time to demand that Reynolds “be honest.”
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