Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively have built an entire brand on trolling each other, but Reynolds’ latest quip feels a little less cute than he might have intended. During a Thursday event promoting his John Candy documentary, the actor admitted he told his wife “f*** you” in order to take a call from Bill Murray — and the crowd laughed.
Reynolds explained that he’d been leaving “40 messages” for Murray in hopes of securing his participation. So when his phone finally lit up with Murray’s name while he and Lively were walking into a formal event, he panicked. Lively whispered, “We have to go in.” His response? “F*** you!” as he darted to answer, per Page Six.
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Sure, Reynolds framed the whole story as a self-deprecating joke, but it’s worth noting the humor only really works if you ignore the optics. As my second-grade teacher once said, if you have to tell people you’re kidding, then you aren’t telling a joke. You’re being a bully.
This isn’t the first time Reynolds’ trolling has edged into uncomfortable territory. Fans recently raised eyebrows when their daughter Inez — then only six or seven — delivered a sexually explicit line in Deadpool & Wolverine, a choice many felt was orchestrated more for shock value than comedy. Add in the couple’s ongoing entanglement in It Ends With Us drama, where Reynolds was accused of “scabbing” during the WGA strike, and the trolling stops looking like harmless banter and starts to resemble a pattern of control.
To be clear, Lively has held her own in their long-running bit, with Instagram unfollows, snarky captions, and her own playful burns. The difference is that trolling online reads differently than hurling an F-bomb at your wife mid-event, no matter how “desperate” you are to talk to Bill Murray.
Ultimately, Reynolds and Lively’s entire public persona rests on the idea that they’re in on the joke together. But when the punchline veers into profanity at your partner’s expense, it raises a question fans have been circling for years: is this still just playful trolling, or is the joke hinting at something a little more insidious about their dynamic?
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Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds
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