Ryan Reynolds is now best-known for his cheeky comedy cameos, owning a Welsh football club, and of course for being the Merc with the Mouth. But he has actually starred in a couple of surprisingly good horror movies – including one that he carried almost completely alone while buried alive. And the lack of oxygen caused him to pass out during takes – no big deal.
Ryan Reynolds has appeared in a couple of horror-comedy movies, but shockingly, in 2010, he starred in a horror movie which he played completely straight. No quips, no sarcasm, just pure, unadulterated terror. And that was easily one of his best movies – Rodrigo Cortes’ Buried.
Buried finds Reynolds playing an American civilian in Iraq who wakes up in a coffin with just a few items, including a phone. The entire movie is almost a one-man-show, focusing on Reynolds in the coffin and it makes for one of the best horror movies of the last 15 years. In 2022, Reynolds explained to David Letterman (via Insider) how hard it was to make; “Almost everything you see in the movie was one take, with the exception of a couple moments where I passed out.”
Reynolds explained why making the thriller movie caused him to faint; “The thing I wasn’t ready for or realized when I was shooting is when you’re out of breath, and you’re not moving to accommodate the increased oxygen in your blood, you pass out.”
“There was one sequence in the movie where I had a paper bag and I would breathe into this paper bag as much as possible before the take,” Reynolds continued. “And then when I came to, somewhere in the middle of the take I would grab it, breathe, breathe, we’d wait for a beat and then keep going.”
Ironically, given that Reynolds spends the movie buried six feet under, he described his choice to star in the movie as; “a purely shallow decision.” Given Reynolds’ recent roles in Netflix action movies and Apple comedy movies, it’s almost impossible to imagine him doing a movie like Buried now.
It’s a shame because it’s widely agreed that Reynolds gives the best performance of his career in the film, which can be compared to the likes of Tom Hardy‘s in Locke. Now, every time a trailer such as the one for Matthew Vaughn’s Argylle drops, audiences are bracing themselves for a Ryan Reynolds jump scare.
For a Ryan Reynolds fix, we’re a big fan of his sports documentary series – as you can see in our Welcome to Wrexham season 2 review.