Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively lead the most powerful gang in Hollywood… cross them at your peril

Taylor Swift worships them, the public (mostly) adore them and their businesses have made them millions. Is there any limit to their powers?

As Kamala Harris’s anxious campaign team, several thousand disappointed brands and a clutch of ex-boyfriends could surely attest, it’s not easy to win a lasting endorsement from Taylor Swift.
The world’s most powerful pop star knows the weight of her word, and so bestows it judiciously. Swift won’t mention you to her 284 million Instagram followers unless she really, really feels like it.
It’s why it was curious when, a few weeks ago, she effectively posted a straightforward advert. “Over the past few years I have watched one of my very best friends on this planet pour every bit of his heart, soul, sweat, time, energy, jokes, pain, joy, rebellion, darkness, and magic into this film. He’s created the work of his life […] I don’t know how he did it,” she wrote. “But that’s just Hugh for you!” 
The message came below a photograph of Swift arm-in-arm with Hugh Jackman, movie director Shawn Levy and, at the centre of it all, Hollywood power couple Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively. The joke, delivered so much in Reynolds’ sardonic online tone that many wondered if he wrote it, is that while Swift is certainly mates with Jackman, really she’s talking about the producer-star of the film she’s hawking.
“Deadpool & Wolverine is out TOMORROW! Here’s where to buy tickets if you like things that are unspeakably awesome,” she concluded, with a sales link and a final flourish – a confirmation she is, as rumoured, godmother to at least one of Reynolds and Lively’s four children. The earthquake you heard in late July was that of a million Swifties heading to the cinema. 
📸| @taylorswift13 via her Insta story celebrating the release of Deadpool and Wolverine! pic.twitter.com/6rep4wpmnq
Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively are less actors than full-time marketeers with occasional sidelines in movie-making these days, but those pursuits have had a rare collision this summer. In July, Reynolds released Deadpool & Wolverine, the Levy-directed Marvel sequel that sees his gratingly quippy superhero team up with Jackman’s cutlery-fingered X-Man. A few weeks later, Lively’s own producer-star vehicle, It Ends With Us, a Colleen Hoover adaptation that manages to make domestic violence seem twee, arrived.
Both have been in publicity mode for months – ceaseless interviews, stunts, red carpets, “fun” videos, brand tie-ins – but the greatest weapon in Lively and Reynolds’ promotional arsenal is their nexus of famous friends. Lively had already deployed Swift: her song My Tears Ricochet appeared on the trailer for It Ends With Us, and along with Bradley Cooper, Britney Spears, The National guitarist Aaron Dessner and Levy, she is thanked in the film’s credits. In some ways, that Swift should also direct her fans towards Deadpool & Wolverine was predictable.
And just look at the box office results. Deadpool & Wolverine currently ranks at number one, raking in over a billion dollars and becoming one of the few blockbuster successes of recent years, while It Ends With Us, despite off-screen dramas that threatened to derail the whole thing, is comfortably in second place. No married couple has taken the top two spots since Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, with Die Hard 2 and Ghost, in 1990. It may be a fairly fruitless summer for Hollywood, but a new king and queen have still conquered it – and across music, fashion, TV and politics, they have a hell of a court backing them up.
Some 40 years ago, the “Brat Pack” of young actors came to dominate cinema with their ubiquity, partying, close friendships (or romances) and appearances in one another’s projects. Those actors – Moore, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy et al – are now in their early 60s. In many ways, the industry has changed beyond recognition. 
In other ways, not least the allegiances and friendship circles that dominate entertainment, it really hasn’t. 
At present, the concentric circles surrounding Reynolds and Lively, from Swift to Jackman, Levy to Cooper and far, far beyond, are as powerful as they come. The difference is that “brat” no longer applies, and not just because Charli XCX has redefined the word. Rather than raw ingenues, this lot are all minor moguls. Fat cat pack? Autocrat pack? Best to leave the marketing to them.
Reynolds, 47, and Lively, 36, are an unusually lasting marriage by Hollywood standards. They met in 2010 on the set of the DC comic book adaptation Green Lantern, and by all accounts (not least those of the studio’s accountants), their relationship was the only significant profit from the production. 
Both child stars, Reynolds, who was born in Canada, had plodded along as a reliable and unnecessarily handsome comic actor for a decade. He was named People’s Sexiest Man Alive in 2010 and Scarlett Johansson’s husband in 2008, before being un-named the latter around the time he met Lively. 
Lively is from a movie family. Born in Los Angeles, she too started young, and by the end of the noughties she was best known as Serena van der Woodsen in the television teen drama Gossip Girl. She was also garlanded by People, which named her “one of 2012’s Most Beautiful at Every Age”. (That really is what the award is called.) Prior to Reynolds, she dated her Gossip Girl co-star Penn Badgley.
As the internet helpfully reminds them, Reynolds and Lively were married in 2012 at Boone Hall Plantation in South Carolina, which features nine former slave cabins. “It’s impossible to reconcile,” Reynolds said four years ago. “What we saw at the time was a wedding venue on Pinterest. What we saw after was a place built upon devastating tragedy.” Florence Welch, a friend of Lively’s through their positions at the time as Karl Lagerfeld’s final muses, reportedly performed three songs at the wedding ceremony. 
Reynolds and Lively’s film careers have often been stop-start, but their sheer force of personality and money-making ability has never been in doubt. The former is evidenced most often on social media, where they quickly became millennial “couple goals” for their trademark and at one time charming spousal teasing. Emily Blunt and John Krasinski, friends of course, are perhaps their only rivals.
The latter is clear from the sheer size of “Business ventures” sections in their biographies. Reynolds has, or had, stakes in everything from Aviation American Gin to Mint Mobile, the Alpine F1 Team and, of course, Wrexham AFC. That football project, with fellow actor Rob McElhenney, has been a wild success on and off the pitch. Reynolds is said to be worth around $350 million, but Lively also has plenty of interests, not least her Betty Buzz and Betty Booze drinks business (she doesn’t personally drink alcohol) and Blake Brown, a haircare line. 
Swift came on the scene in 2015, after Lively mentioned her song Bad Blood in an Instagram post about her recent L’Oreal campaign. She was soon posting a photograph of her and Reynolds and her family backstage at Swift’s 1989 tour. “Look how rad she is here making my niece Heather feel like a rock star. Love my Canadian family almost as much as I love Taylor Lively. I mean Swift. Okay, FIIINE we can hyphenate our last names. Xo Blake Swift-Lively 4eva,” Lively wrote, laying it on typically thick.
They have been remarkably close ever since. Lively and Reynolds’ now nine-year-old daughter, James, can be heard giggling at the start of Swift’s 2017 song Gorgeous. Three years later, the characters in her song Betty, are named for all the Lively-Reynolds daughters – James, Inez, seven, and Betty, four. They now also have a one-year-old son, Olin. Swift and Levy, the director of all three Deadpool films, are godparents.
Jackman has been Reynolds’ best friend “for almost two decades”, Reynolds has said. “He and I are very outwardly jokey, but in real life, most of our conversations are intense and emotional.” The current US Vogue, its all-important September issue, features a shoot with Lively and Jackman as glamorous felons, directed by another long-time friend, Baz Luhrmann.
In the accompanying interview, Lively compares Swift to Jackman. “To be friends with her is to have the most beautiful, effortlessly cool, witty, fun, fashionable, creative, caring bonus sister.” Swift, who is believed to be on tour currently, did not attend any premieres for Deadpool & Wolverine or It Ends With Us, but in her place was another of Lively’s best friends, the supermodel Gigi Hadid. She and Lively dressed as the film’s titular characters. Hadid, it should be noted, is rumoured to be engaged to Bradley Cooper. 
A post shared by Vogue (@voguemagazine)
How one couple can be quite so popular is beyond human explanation, but the tendrils of their network go far. Mariah Carey? They all have playdates. Jake Gyllenhaal? “One of the kindest guys I’ve ever met.” George Clooney? If anything, a role model, in all regards. Salma Hayek? She has cooked for them. Barack Obama? He invited Reynolds and Lively to meet his daughters at a state dinner for Justin Trudeau. Whether the couple are Democrat donors is speculated more than confirmed, but few would be surprised.
So present have Reynolds and Lively been lately that the internet has finally started to turn on them. In modern pop culture, you either occasionally disappear or stay in the spotlight long enough to see yourself become the villain. The consensus is that Reynolds’s press tour with Jackman, while admirable in its sheer ubiquity, was perhaps a little much. 
Lively’s own summer has been criticised for everything from giving an abuse drama an oddly Barbie-like energy, to a speculated fall-out with her co-star and director, Justin Baldoni, to the revelation that Reynolds re-wrote a key scene. “He works on everything I do. I work on everything he does. So, his wins, his celebrations are mine and mine are his. I mean, he’s all over this film,” she said.
“Has Blake Lively finally girlbossed too close to the sun?” one commentator asked, amid the acres of coverage given to Lively and Reynolds this month. In all likelihood, she doesn’t care. Nor does he. The leaders of the most powerful gang in Hollywood sit pretty. Cross them at your peril.