Ryan Paevey: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

When Hallmark Channel premieres “Under the Christmas Sky” as part of its Countdown to Christmas lineup on October 21, 2023, it will mark actor Ryan Paevey‘s 16th Hallmark movie. For someone who says he stumbled into acting, 39-year-old Paevey has turned his talent into quite a career.

Here are five fast facts about the Hallmark heartthrob you need to know…

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1. Ryan Paevey Started Out as a Model & Soap Opera Star

Paevey was born in Torrance, California, to Linda Paevey and Les Vlieger, per IMDb. In 2022, he told a fan via Instagram in 2022 that his dad worked in construction and that he “worked for/with him for a long time.” His mom, he told “Lifestyle Magazine” in December 2020, is “highly, highly educated,” so his parents thought he’d have a “left brain” job, not a creative career. 

In high school, Paevey was recruited to be a model and posed for campaigns for major brands including Izod and Corona, according to Wide Open Country. He also appeared in multiple music videos, including Christina Aguilera’s 2012 song “Your Body.”

“I was a terrible model,” Pavey told “Hearts of Stars” host Jennifer Silliman in March 2022.

But acting in music videos led him into acting as a career, when he landed a recurring role on “General Hospital” in 2013. For five years, he played detective Nathan West on the soap before his character died.

“They didn’t fire me, and I didn’t quit,” he told Extra TV in 2018. “We had talked about a certain period of time that I was going to be working for them, and that time elapsed. I was honored that they wrote such a great story for my departure.”

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2. Ryan Paevey Had to Back Out of His First Hallmark Role Due to a Serious Motorcycle Accident

By the time Paevey left “General Hospital,” he had already become a fan favorite on Hallmark. His first movie for the network was “Unleashing Mr. Darcy,” opposite Cindy Busby, which premiered in 2016.

But that movie came as a surprise to Paevey after a nasty motorcycle accident in July 2015 left him in such rough shape that he had to back out of his first project with Hallmark.

Paevey had taken his Harley Davidson motorcycle, nicknamed “Lilith,” on a camping adventure with friends at the Chilao Campground in Palmdale, California. But the avid biker “took a spill,” he wrote on Instagram after the accident, revealing that the crash “shattered my right wrist.”

During his 2022 Hearts of Stars interview, Paevey said he’d originally auditioned and landed “a supporting role of some sort” with the network. Unfortunately, he said, his bike accident occurred just one week after learning he’d landed the movie role.

“I almost lost my right hand,” he said. “Yeah, here’s a fun fact. I got up off the ground (and) my right hand was facing the wrong way.”

Peavey required extensive surgery and shared the before-and-after X-rays of his wrist on Instagram. His manager had to call Hallmark to back out of role they’d just booked Paevey for.

“I was so down on myself,” he recalled. “I remember sitting in my hospital bed and just being like, ‘You just burned this bridge. And it was a really good bridge. You ruined it.'”

Paevey returned to “General Hospital” a few weeks later, he said, figuring he’d never hear again from Hallmark. So he was shocked when the network came calling about two months later, offering him the lead role in “Unleashing Mr. Darcy.”

Getting that role “changed everything,” he said.

Paevey quickly became a fan favorite and signed a movie deal with Hallmark in early 2022, per Deadline.

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3. Very Little is Known About Ryan Paevey’s Love Life, But He’s a Big Fan of Falling in Love

Paevey wasn’t kidding when he told Hearts of Stars that he’s a “pretty private person.” Despite his fame, he’s managed to keep his personal life out of public view. There have been rumors of romantic relationships over the years, but none that he has confirmed.

In 2018, he told Extra TV that he thought he was a difficult person to date because he works so much.

“”I’m a workaholic,” he said. “I don’t even have a dog.”

When he was promoting “Unleashing Mr. Darcy” in 2016, he said that Busby’s character of Elizabeth — based on the protagonist in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” — is the kind of woman he’s attracted to.

“I like Elizabeth, I’d like to meet an Elizabeth,” he told Hallmark Channel about his ideal partner. “Brains and a sense of humor, I think, trump everything else. Gotta be able to laugh because I’m a goofy guy sometimes.”

In that interview, Paevey said that he lives his life “on autopilot” and can be “pretty stoic,” but loves the thrill of falling in love.

“I absolutely believe in love at first sight,” he said. “I used to think a lot of these things were, like, really cliche statements like, ‘She took my breath away.’ I was like, ‘Put it on a card, come on, really?’ Until you meet somebody who does that. It’s a very strange phenomenon but it’s a real thing. Totally happens.”

Another stumbling block may be his lack of self-esteem, despite his success and legions of fans.

“I hate myself,” Paevey told Hearts of Stars’ Silliman during an April 2023 interview. “I have a really powerful self-deprecation complex. But I’m working on the whole ‘never break’ thing. I’m trying to get a hold of this inner monologue thing and teach it to speak to me a little kinder.”

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4. By Combining His Love of Nature & Jewelry Making, Ryan Paevey Has Built a Successful Business

Though his 2015 motorcycle crash left Paevey’s wrist with permanent damage, he still has enough fine motor skills to make unique jewelry through his independent business, Fortunate Wanderer. He has a home studio in Los Angeles where he’s honed his craft.

In June 2022, Paevey told Just Jared that he started experimenting with silversmithing and designing jewelry when he was on “General Hospital.”

“I don’t know, I was looking for another creative outlet, shall we say,” he said. “Everybody around the studio was kind of starting to get into some sort of hobby. The gals were all knitting and things like that. And I was like, yeah, all right. I need to (do something).”

His focus, he said, is to create one-of-a-kind jewelry with natural materials, from rare stones to petrified wood, reflective of his love of nature.

He told the outlet, “I know that people can buy jewelry pretty much anywhere, and there’s all kinds of people out there doing it, but my particular style is I really like to offer them something that they can’t just get anywhere.”

In addition to sharing his latest pendants, cuffs and rings on Instagram, Paevey also shares his love of nature on Instagram. His photos and videos have ranged from tenderly holding a hummingbird he rescued to a sweet video of him giving an insect water on a hot day.

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5. Video Games are One of Ryan Paevey’s Other Passions

Paevey has long been a fan of video games, and finds gaming on his phone fulfilling, too. When Silliman asked him in April which video game was his favorite, he quipped, “All of them.”

He said one of his favorite apps is Pokemon Go, and then said, “‘Last of Us’ since everybody’s talking about the show. I love that game, it’s one of my top five games ever made and it’s a fantastic story. The first one. The second one is an abomination — fight me on it (if you disagree).”

In 2021, Paevey told FanSided, “Between ‘Mario,’ ‘Super Metroid’ and ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time,’ I cannot tell you how much of my life I’ve pumped into Super Nintendo.”

So much time, in fact, that he admitted he had to shut off his gaming systems for a while because he found he was wasting whole afternoons playing video games.

He explained, “I’ll sit down in front of the TV and I’ll look over and then all of a sudden I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been sitting here for six hours! I lost the whole day. I lost a whole day. Like the sun is setting!’ Sometimes that’s what happens too. Like, the sun will be coming sideways through a window. And I’m like, ‘Oh, the sun is sideways! It’s sunset! Oh man, no, no, no, no! I sat down at lunch. It’s like 6:23 PM. We have a problem. I had a whole bunch of stuff I was supposed to do today. And I did none of it.’ So these days, unfortunately I have to leave all my video game stuff off. Cause if I sit down, it’s over!”

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