Ryan Reynolds Faces Backlash Over Comment About Raising Three Boys With Blake Lively

Ryan Reynolds went on Late Night With Seth Meyers to do the usual charming-dad bit and, yeah, it backfired. A couple of his lines about his kids lit up social media, and not in the fun way.

What he said on the show

Reynolds ran through a compare-and-contrast between his three daughters and his youngest child, a son named Olin. He framed it like this: there was nothing violent or creepy in their home, so he has no clue why his son arrived laser-focused on three things he rattled off as "violence, breasts, and engines." He also joked that if he and Blake Lively had started with three boys instead of three girls, he would have tapped out.

"If I had 3 boys at first - I would never, there’s no way. I would give myself a punching vasectomy."

He added that his daughters were "so easy" by comparison, while his son wants to "break everything." Meyers played along and asked if introducing a boy into the mix created an "HR issue" with his daughters. Reynolds grinned and said he basically feels like he is in direct competition with the kid.

The childhood story he used to set it up

Reynolds then pulled the curtain back on the house he grew up in: parents Tammy Reynolds and James "Jim" Chester Reynolds had four boys — Jeff, Jerry, Patrick, and Ryan, the youngest. He described it as endless roughhousing. By age 8, he says he could patch drywall fast enough to hide the evidence before his dad got home — spackle, sand, paint, done. He joked his brothers sometimes made him leave rooms without using the door and that his head got used like a battering ram. Subtle, it was not.

Fans were not amused

The studio audience offered a few uneasy laughs, but once clips hit X on Oct. 10–11, 2025, the mood turned. A sampling of what people zeroed in on:

• Calling the bit "cringe" and "not funny," with some saying his attempt to bond with parents fell flat.
• Dragging the line about "breasts" as making something basic to infant survival sound creepy.
• Complaints that his shtick has worn thin, with a few wishing he and Lively would take a long break from the spotlight.
• One thread veered into his current press tour, asking why Colin Hanks was not fronting the John Candy doc promotion instead.
• Former fans saying he used to be a favorite but this pushed them off the bandwagon, plus the usual memes and eye-roll gifs.

Meanwhile, Blake Lively praised their son on the same show earlier this year

Adding to the odd optics, Lively was on Meyers back in May and described the same kid as a little charmer. In her words, when she walks in he greets her with "Mama, my love!" and tells her she is the love of his life. She called their house "chaos at all times," but in a gooey, proud-mom way. She even joked she gets dressed like a middle schooler with a crush, hoping he notices — a bit that did not mention her husband at all.

Where this leaves Reynolds

Reynolds clearly wanted to do the wink-wink, boy-vs-girl, survivor-of-brothers routine and score some quick laughs. Instead, the "punching vasectomy" line and the "violence, breasts, and engines" riff set off a mini-firestorm, especially with some fans already side-eyeing Lively over past interview behavior. Whether he dials back the edgier dad jokes or shrugs this off and keeps rolling remains to be seen, but the temperature online this week has been... not warm.