TODAY
She still looks terrified.
Following all of the backlash over the Peloton holiday spot she did, actress Monica Ruiz made a surprising and hilarious appearance in an Aviation Gin video, basically continuing her role as the beleaguered “Peleton Wife.”
The whole thing happened so fast, only a few days passed between the two videos, that Ruiz never actually had the chance to meet Aviation Gin’s famous owner Ryan Reynolds.
On Thursday, with both of them set to appear on TODAY, the two finally came face to face.
“It started with a text to my creative partner George Dewey,” Reynolds told Hoda. “He sent me the ad, I watched it and I went ‘Oh wow, I see why there’s some backlash.’ So I said ‘Can we just send her a year’s supply of gin? She doesn’t have to film herself.’ And then that sort of evolved from there.
“We love acknowledging and playing with the cultural landscape and we thought this was a great opportunity to do something. You see how everything is sort of divisive these days, it’s like one camp here, one camp there, but we had this thought that we could do this ad without contributing to that divide, without really vilifying anybody, just sort of commenting on both the person and the actress in the ad all at once. So for us it seemed like a no brainer, and it was a lot of fun to do. It was a rush, we did this thing in 36 hours.”
Crazy, right? Even crazier is the fact that this actress, Monica Ruiz, went from appearing in an ad with little expectations to sitting on stage at TODAY next to freaking Ryan Reynolds.
“I’m like in an alternate universe right now, this is so weird,” said Ruiz.
Priot to meeting Reynolds, Ruiz joked that the whole Peloton controversy was probably all her fault.
“Honestly, I think it was just my face,” said Ruiz. “My eyebrows looked worried I guess. People were like, ‘You look scared.’ I’m telling you, it was my face, that was the problem, and it just exploded it from there. She looks worried.”
Later in his solo interview, Reynolds addressed Kate Beckinsale’s claim that she looks just like him.
“It’s like looking in a mirror,” Reynolds said after watching Beckinsale tell her story on The Tonight Show. “I mean, I was going to wear that [dress] today. You know what? This has been something I’ve heard for a long time. Others said it to me as well. We met one time.”
Thursday night, Reynolds made another appearance to promote his new movie 6 Underground, this time with Jimmy Fallon. Naturally, they also talked about what went down with Ruiz and the Aviation Gin spot.
“How did you pull this off, and why did you do this? ” asked Fallon.
“Well, like, you know, I’ve been there in that position as an actor, where you do something that doesn’t quite work,” Reynolds replied. “And I really wish somebody from a gin company called me right after Green Lantern and was, like, ‘Hey, I got something funny you can do as an answer to that.’
“So, yeah, we got ahold of her. It was really difficult ’cause nobody wanted — nobody knew how to get ahold of her. Obviously, the people at Peloton
didn’t want us to get ahold of her. But we got ahold of her, and within 36 hours, we had shot, chopped, and put out this commercial.”
What an amazing story.