While Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds officially welcomed their fourth child at the start of 2023, it took over a year for either actor to spill any details about the baby in question. Yet, just a few days after the 47-year-old Deadpool star revealed the name of his fourth child, he confirmed Olin Reynolds is a little boy.
Reynolds shared the news in a bittersweet conversation with John Bell, who founded the mental health non-profit Walking 4 Hope after the death of his late son, Jake Bell, who was a huge Deadpool fan. “The resilience it takes to put one foot in front of the other, as many times as you’ve done it, and transmute that much grief into something powerfully useful,” Reynolds told Bell. “I’m very grateful that you shared his story. I want to share with you that I too have a son, and if I love him one tenth as much as you love Jake, I feel like I’ve done a pretty damn good job.”
Aside from Olin, Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively share three daughters: James, Inez, and Betty, whose names you might recognize from their godmother Taylor Swift’s song, “Betty.” Just this past May, Reynolds joked that they “always wait for Taylor to tell us what the child’s name will be” when asked to share their youngest’s name on the Today show.
The prospect of having a son once “terrified” Reynolds. “When we had our youngest [daughter], I was quietly terrified it was gonna be a boy because I didn’t know, we didn’t know. I didn’t know anything but girls,” Reynolds told Access Hollywood in November 2021. “I grew up with boys, and I was constantly being thrown through walls when there was a perfectly good door five feet away.”
Even so, Reynolds revealed he “never in a million years would have imagined” raising daughters. “I love being a girl dad,” Reynolds told Access in 2020. “I’m the youngest of four boys so for me to have three daughters has been such a ride and I love every second of it.”
Reynolds recently gave a shoutout to all four of his children in a speech at the Deadpool & Wolverine premiere on July 22. “I want to start by saying thank you to my wife Blake, who is here,” the actor said, per Page Six. “I want to thank my kids, James, Inez, Betty, Olin, who are here. I hope that, if I’m lucky, this moment will be the most traumatic thing—that is, the contents of this movie—that happens in your wondrous life.”
