Ryan Reynolds Teams With Sarah McLachlan to Save the Abandoned Carts in Hilarious Commercial

In addition to being an actor, producer, and businessman, Ryan Reynolds has developed a reputation as an advertising icon. Reynolds and his Maximum Effort agency have been at the center of some pretty clever and Internet-breaking advertising campaigns for a number of companies over the years, and it looks like the tech startup Bolt is now among them. On Monday, the company debuted a brand new commercial, which enlists singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan to immortalize the abandoned items in online shopping carts.

As anyone who is familiar with McLachlan might expect, the advertisement lampoons the infamous PSA that she did for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which pulled on viewers' heartstrings by putting her song "Angel" next to images of neglected animals. While this Bolt advertisement turns that original commerical's ethos into a more meme-worthy cause, it definitely gets the point across.

This isn't the first time that Reynolds has worked McLachlan into one of his advertisements, as he name-dropped her in a 2018 commercial for Aviation Gin. In that commercial, he joked that each crate of Aviation Gin is "serenaded" by McLachlan, and shouted her out on Twitter afterwards.

"We're really risk-averse. So, people really think that we like to shoot from the hip, because we move so quickly and that sort of stuff," Reynolds said of his commercials in a 2020 interview with AdWeek. "But, we really think this stuff through. We really find our guard rails. In the same way I write Deadpool. It's like, 'Okay, what is a person that's hyper-sensitive to this type of material going to say?' What's the guy who just doesn't give a **** about anything going to say? I want to find the middle where everyone feels sort of seen in that."

"I've approached that with Aviation and everything else we're working on," Reynolds added. "Working through that lens of empathy and that guides us in a weird way. That doesn't mean that you can't be subversive or super funny, and risky, or at least feel super risky. But, it definitely prevents you from stepping in the wrong direction. I say that knowing that I am just as susceptible to stepping in something that I didn't mean to step in as anybody. There are mistakes."

What do you think of Ryan Reynolds and Sarah McLachlan's new commercial? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!