The holiday season kicks off in earnest this week, and Ryan Reynolds is ready as ever with a creative new ad for Aviation Gin. Appearing in the ad with Amy Smart, the pair film a “self-funded sequel” to Just Friends, their 2005 Christmas romcom, “based on a loose interpretation of IP law.” The short features Smart and Reynolds together again, presumably playing Jamie Palamino and Chris Brander for the first time in almost 20 years. Of course, nobody’s getting Reynolds back into a fat suit for this. Instead it’s just a green screen set.
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The original film centered on Reynolds and Smart as a pair of high school friends from New Jersey. Unbeknownst to Smart’s Jamie, Reynolds’s Chris has pined for her for years, feeling stuck in the “friend zone.” In the years since the movie was released, it has remained a fan-favorite (even while the “friend zone” concept has largely fallen out of favor).
You can see the ad below.
If you haven’t watched Just Friends in a while, you might be forgiven for forgetting it was a Christmas movie. Its biggest pop culture legacies are Ryan Reynolds in a fat suit and lots of conversations about how gross it is to have a whole movie centering around the concept of the “friend zone.” But it was marketed as a holiday movie, released in November 2023, and earned over $50 million at the box office.
In the movie, Reynolds’s character had been chubby and unpopular in high school, but grew up to look like Ryan Reynolds and become a kind of proto-pickup artist. The transformation was brought on by feeling rejected by Jamie, and when the two eventually met up again years later, none of his tricks worked on her, as being around her shook his confidence.
Smart was at the height of her fame in 2005, coming off a decade of work that included Varsity Blues, The Butterfly Effect, and Rat Race, among others. In the years since, she has segued that era of huge success into career as a ubiquitous TV guest star, with occasional lead roles, often in romantic or holiday movies. She had memorable parts on Scrubs and Justified, and played Jason Statham’s love interest in the two Crank movies. For our readers, she is probably best known for her three seasons as Barbarar Whitmore on Max and The CW’s Stargirl, based on the DC Comics character of the same name.
