“Brands are wonderful,” Ryan Reynolds told the audience at the Cannes Lions festival last week. “I grew up adoring and loving commercials.”

It is rare to find such a straightforward declaration of love for advertising these days, especially from someone within the industry. Perhaps it is down to the fact that Reynolds only recently entered the marketing world, having previously forged global fame as an actor, that he can be so unashamedly joyful about it all.

It turns out that Reynolds also had some astute observations to make about the industry too, which he shared with a packed audience in Cannes, where he was introduced as the person that most festival goers wanted to hear from.

This is surely in part due to the Hollywood glow that comes with Reynolds, who has gained fame as both an actor and producer of films including Deadpool and Deadpool 2, and most recently The Adam Project. But he has also made a significant impact in advertising in recent years, via a series of witty spots for brands he has invested in – including Aviation Gin and Mint Mobile – as well as creating successful ads for others, including Match.com.

For Reynolds, his two different careers fed into each other, with his film production company Maximum Effort “inadvertently” evolving into a marketing company during his ten-year struggle to get the first Deadpool movie made. Even after getting studio sign off, the budget for the film was low, and the team had to “make every dollar feel like ten”.

“As we did this I was learning lessons left, right and centre,” he says. This included replacing “spectacle with character” as the budget didn’t stretch to dramatic stunts. “It worked just as well,” Reynolds says. “Audiences at this point were pretty numb to CGI spectacle … and it really landed.”

Reynolds and his co-founder at Maximum Effort, George Dewey, stumbled headfirst into advertising after the success of the movie, when Reynolds used some of the “sweet Deadpool money” to buy Aviation Gin and they set about marketing the brand. “It inadvertently became a marketing company from that,” he says. “And we were having the time of our lives, genuinely the time of our lives. Doing things a little bit differently. And then we started branching out to other clients and that’s just been a dream come true.”

If you were to sum up a Maximum Effort ad, it contains a few core components: humour, fun, and an ability to tap into the zeitgeist. Reynolds stars in most of the ads for the companies he part-owns, which has led to some cynically pointing out that his multifaceted role as both client, creative and famous actor gives him significant advantages over most creatives when it comes to getting ideas out the door. But, as he explains, it’s all a little more nuanced than simply trading on his fame and position.

For a start, Maximum Effort is determined to respond quickly to events in culture, with Reynolds and Dewey often writing ads over text. “Speed for us is a huge part of what we do,” he says. “Culture moves really fast. We are incredibly connected…. So if something happens in culture, you’ll see a tweet about it and that tweet gets two million likes because they’ve touched that cultural nerve, but if you can add production to that it’s just a whole next level. Taking a conversation that’s already happening and then you’re inserting your brand into that conversation, then the brand becomes the conversation.

“And if you’re doing it in a way that is with a ‘do no harm, no shots fired’ sort of philosophy behind it, it’s becomes incredibly fun,” he continues. “And fuck it, ads should be fun, they’re ads. To me that idea was really drilled home in 2020 when every ad was ‘these are unprecedented times’ and it was ‘oh my god, everyone is struggling so much right now, that’s not what you want to hear’. We want to lighten the load a little bit. Let’s not contribute anything to the weight that we are carrying.”

Reynolds also points out that the image of himself that he presents on screen – which comes across as effortlessly witty and relaxed – isn’t the whole story either. “I do feel I’m projecting something that I’m not necessarily,” he says. “I am light but I also have these other aspects. I feel like the guy that makes jokes, the guy that plays Deadpool, the guy who does all those ads and stuff isn’t necessarily me, he’s the guy I wish I kind of was.”

He explained how appearing on talk shows such as Letterman could induce huge anxiety, and that he has learnt to recognise that there are a number of sides to his character. This doesn’t necessarily help with the stage fright, however. “‘This is going to end badly, I’m actually going to sit in this chair and pass away.’ These are the thoughts going through my mind and then he calls my name and I step out and it’s like this other guy shows up,” he says of appearing on Letterman. “And when I come back I sort of become me again and think ‘wow I wish I could be that guy all the time, he just really saved my ass there’.”

These feelings contribute to a desire to create advertising work that is fun and entertaining. “I think everybody to a certain degree has anxiety,” he says. “Sometimes it might completely swallow my life whole so when I’m thinking outwardly and want to create something, I want to unburden others of that or I want to do whatever I can not to contribute to more of that.

“I love humour,” he continues. “Humour and emotion are the two things that travel the most virally. If you can do both in one that’s the unicorn that everyone is looking for. Oftentimes ads are very sincere, hyper sincere and I think they’re kind of noise. If you really want to punch through, make people laugh.”

Reynolds’ ads are also recognisable for their overt use of the product. Coming at a time when advertising award shows tend to recognise work that is more focused on concept or social purpose over any kind of overt sales message, this places Maximum Effort slightly out of fashion with the current trend. Though this is carefully thought out.

“I believe in breaking down the artifice of marketing,” Reynolds says. “Consumers and audiences, they know they’re being marketed to, they can feel the tactics, they can feel the conversation the executives had about this ad. I really believe that. So if you can drop the artifice a little bit and lean into it and speak to folks plainly and say ‘yeah this is an ad’, they’re much more willing to share it.

“We all watch Super Bowl ads,” he continues, “and the Super Bowl ads I’ve seen are just miraculous, I just love them, but sometimes the product disappears. You’re seeing an ad that’s so funny but afterwards I’m talking about the actor that was in it but I couldn’t tell you what the product was. So we definitely make sure that the products we’re working with creatively speaking are front and centre. And we are very clear that this is marketing.”

As well as discussing his approach to marketing, Reynolds used his visit to Cannes Lions to launch Creative Ladder, a new initiative aimed at encouraging diverse new talent into marketing, which he has founded with Dionna Dorsey Calloway, CEO and founder of District of Clothing, and David Griner, formerly international editor at Adweek.

Reynolds sees Creative Ladder as offering opportunities to under-represented voices, but also bringing fresh ideas and perspectives into the industry. “We have a level of storytelling that we can reach that would be so much better with inclusion and diversity as a huge strategic point,” he says.

“There is so much talent out there,” he continues. “I want better stories and better stories are told through diversity, through complex and unique and different perspectives and opinions … how can we continue to tell stories that are relevant if they are only relevant to a few?”

Ryan Reynolds was speaking at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, canneslions.com; maximumeffort.com; mountain.com; creativeladder.org