Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac have made following a Welsh football club an entertainment proposition of its own. Between their work on screen and their roles as Wrexham AFC’s co-chairmen, the pair have plenty of opportunities to turn the business of football into comedy. Finding the right player, however, is usually a matter best left to the people who know what happens on the pitch.
That distinction makes a recruitment interview particularly inviting territory for the duo. Put two celebrity owners across from a prospective player, and there is already room for their priorities to take an unexpected turn. Add a couple of Wrexham footballers to the proceedings, and the setup has everything it needs for a very unconventional addition to the team.
Reynolds and Mac star in a new Nex Playground campaign debuting October 6, marking their first appearance for the company since its Wrexham AFC partnership was announced earlier this year. Created in collaboration with Maximum Effort, the spot features the co-chairmen conducting a mock player interview alongside Wrexham players Josh Windass and Ben Sheaf. The surprise is who they are recruiting: a young Nex Playground player whose gaming skills earn them a place in the spotlight.
Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard
Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.
🐕Wick
🏁Fast
🧨Mission
🎄Die Hard
01
How does a room know you’ve walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.
02
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.
03
Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.
04
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you’re actually made of.
05
There’s a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.
06
How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.
07
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.
08
When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.
Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.
John Wick · Chapters 1–4 · 2014–2023
John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.
The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
against him.
You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
then completely immovable past it.
Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
and turning it into technique rather than noise.
People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
work.
The Fast and the Furious · Fast X · 2001–2023
Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.
This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to.
You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
defend it past the point of reason.
You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
Mission: Impossible · The Final Reckoning · 1996–2025
Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left.
You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
administrative error.
You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
Die Hard · A Good Day to Die Hard · 1988–2013
Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
and then it makes you unstoppable.
You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
Nex Playground’s Wrexham Campaign Arrives Just Ahead of Sonic’s Debut
The new spot follows Nex’s partnership with Wrexham AFC, announced in June, which made the company the club’s official kit sleeve sponsor for the 2026–27 season. The agreement also outlined a dedicated Nex Game Zone and youth-focused community initiatives, alongside plans for Nex to appear in Welcome to Wrexham. This campaign gives that relationship a comedy showcase featuring both the club’s celebrity co-chairmen and members of its playing squad. There is another familiar face on the way to Nex Playground immediately after the campaign’s debut. Sonic Forces joins Play Pass on October 7, according to the campaign announcement, adding the blue hedgehog to the platform’s lineup of active gaming experiences. For families interested in trying another recognizable entertainment franchise, the launch puts a new game on the calendar just a day after Reynolds and Mac’s recruitment exercise.
Nex previously announced that its Sonic project would be developed by SEGA’s HARDlight Studios, the team behind titles including Sonic Dream Team and Sonic Dash. The company described the game as a physically active take on the franchise’s mobile running and action gameplay, adapted for Nex Playground. Access comes through Play Pass, the platform’s separately sold content subscription. The timing gives Nex two different ways to draw attention to its growing entertainment lineup this week. Reynolds and Mac bring the football comedy on October 6, while Sonic follows with a new reason for players to get moving on October 7. Wrexham’s next great signing may still need to prove themselves on the pitch, but this particular recruitment process has room for a different kind of star.
