Ryan Reynolds has a philosophy about making good television, and it’s basically the opposite of what you’d expect from a Hollywood exec. The Welcome to Wrexham executive producer told Ankler Media’s Katey Rich that the show’s success came down to admitting what he didn’t know – and actually meaning it.
“The power of ‘I don’t know’ is so exceptional to me,” Reynolds said in the conversation for In the Running: Emmy Contenders in Conversation with The Ankler.
That series is presented by Disney. Rich is Ankler Media’s awards editor and the host of Prestige Junkie. She sits down with top talent from Disney’s TV networks and streaming platforms for it. Rich is good at getting people to say the quiet part loud. Reynolds didn’t disappoint.
The core of it is simple. Welcome to Wrexham worked because Reynolds and co-owner Rob McElhenney showed up in Wrexham, Wales, and actually listened. They didn’t parachute in with a pre-written narrative about American dreamers saving a small-town soccer club. They let the town tell its own story.
Reynolds and McElhenney bought AFC Wrexham when the club was playing in the fifth tier of English football. There was no guaranteed fairy-tale ending. The cameras were rolling whether the team won or lost. That vulnerability is a big part of what made people watch.
That’s rare. Hollywood types buying up struggling sports teams and turning them into content usually go one of two ways. The show becomes a vanity project the actual community resents, or it becomes a polished product that looks great from the outside but has no soul. Welcome to Wrexham dodged both.
The show has been in Emmy contention across multiple seasons now. Reynolds has been doing the promotional circuit, but the In the Running sit-down with Rich is one of the more candid ones. He wasn’t pitching. He was explaining why it actually worked.
The “I don’t know” angle is a bigger deal than it sounds. Reynolds is wildly famous and wildly successful. He could have walked into Wrexham with a team of producers and a vision board and nobody would have blinked. Choosing to treat it as a learning process instead of a showcase took something. Not everyone would do that.
Rich’s Prestige Junkie is one of the sharper awards-season shows around. It’s no surprise she got Reynolds to go specific. The full conversation is available through The Ankler.
Welcome to Wrexham is an FX production streaming on Hulu. The show follows real Welsh football club AFC Wrexham after Reynolds and McElhenney bought it in 2020. It’s earned Emmy nominations and stayed one of the most talked-about sports documentaries on TV.
Reynolds is known for being self-deprecating in interviews. But what he told Rich wasn’t the usual aw-shucks routine. It was a real point about why listening matters more than controlling the narrative. For a show about a community that wasn’t asking to be on TV, that probably made all the difference.
The In the Running series continues through Emmy season.
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