Ryan Reynolds

Ryan Reynolds (born 1976) is the star of the Deadpool franchise and one of Hollywood’s savviest businessmen — co-owner of Aviation Gin, Welsh football club Wrexham AFC, and budget carrier Mint Mobile, which T-Mobile acquired in 2023 in a deal worth up to $1.35 billion. His agency Maximum Effort is known for fast, self-aware marketing stunts.

The first ChatGPT commercial

In January 2023, weeks after ChatGPT’s launch, Reynolds put the chatbot to work: he prompted it to write a Mint Mobile ad in his own voice, requiring a joke, a curse word, and a plug that the company’s holiday promotion was still running. He then read the AI’s script verbatim on camera. Mint Mobile claimed it as the first ad of its kind, and Reynolds closed the spot by admitting the output was “mildly terrifying, but compelling.”

The stunt went viral precisely because the script sounded like Reynolds — viewers found it uncanny that the model had absorbed his comedic register. Marketing press treated it as an early proof that generative AI could produce usable, on-brand creative in seconds.

Reynolds’s embrace has been playful rather than programmatic — a technologist-entrepreneur testing a new tool in public rather than an ideologue. As an early, cheerful adopter who put AI-written words in his own mouth for a brand he owned, he sits firmly on the experimenting side of the debate.

Nutella for breakfast

The enthusiasm has since acquired an edge. Closing Cisco’s WebexOne conference in October 2025, Reynolds — who has used AI to clean up dialogue replacement on a shoot — offered the crowd a warning wrapped in a joke: “AI is like Nutella for breakfast — too much and you’re going to feel sick.” In the same session he argued that instinct still beats analytics, noting that his biggest viral hits are ones the data would have killed.

Weeks later, Maximum Effort turned the fight over synthetic performers into an ad. Amid the backlash against Tilly Norwood, the AI “actress” unveiled in late 2025, Mint Mobile cast a real Mint customer who happens to be named Tilly Norwood, with Reynolds asking on camera whether she was “not an AI-generated combination of actors” and the fine print restricting the offer to “real people only,” excluding “algorithms, synthetic consciousnesses, virtual influencers and any AI amalgamations.” Reynolds uses the tools where they help and mocks them where they replace people — an adopter with one line drawn, not a convert to the other camp.