Turns out, even though Ryan Reynolds has been married to Blake Lively since 2012, he's still learning new things about his wife.
Recently, the actress and proud mom debuted her new hair care line named Blake Brown. While taking to Instagram to celebrate Lively and her accomplishment, Reynolds revealed that he had no idea Brown was actually Blake Lively's official last name.
"I'm obscenely proud of this woman. She's been working on @blakebrownbeauty for 7 years," Reynolds wrote on his Instagram Stories, People reports. "And the result is exactly what you'd expect of a hyper-obsessive, detail addicted, uncompromising quality control genius. Also, I just found out her last name is Brown."
Reynolds isn't the only one to be a bit surprised to learn that Lively is not Blake's "real" last name. The actress did explain her surname situation recently and while speaking to reporters at a New York City event celebrating the launch of her latest endeavor.
“Brown is my dad's name. My dad took Lively from my mom, which is her story to tell. It's a longer, much more interesting story," Lively explained at the time, as reported by People. "But I just thought that was really cool. My mom had three kids and he was like, ‘I'm not going to take their name from them, I'm not going to make them take my name. I'll just take their name.’ That was before I was born, well before I was born."
Lively went on to explain that her father took the surname Lively and that as a result she has "only ever been called Blake Lively," despite what is actually on her birth certificate.
"Blake Brown was on my birth certificate and then would show up in legal documents here and there. It was always kind of like an identity I never fully stepped into," she continued. "Yet it was the most intimate identity of mine because it's like the most personal name."
While Lively's father is not the only husband or partner to decide to adopt his wife's surname, it is a decision that is rather uncommon in the United States. According to one 2023 Pew Research survey, only 5% of men in opposite-sex marriages take their wife's last name when they get married, and less than 1% of men choose to hyphenate their last names.
Lively said that because people "don't know anything about" her official last name (including her husband, apparently) it was important to her to pay homage to her real surname via her new hair care line, and then to speak candidly about her father's decision to take her mom's last name.
"People don't know anything about it," she explained at the time. "It was important to me to put my name on this brand because I worked so hard on it and is so personal to me."
