Willie Geist marked 10 years of his interview franchise on April 7, 2026, hosting Ryan Reynolds at a sold-out Sunday Sitdown LIVE event at City Winery in Manhattan. The special featuring Reynolds airs tomorrow night on NBC.
The evening gave Geist a live-stage version of the conversation that made Sunday Sitdown one of his signature projects. The interview franchise debuted as a podcast in 2018, and Sunday Sitdown LIVE only began in January 2025 with comedian Nate Bargatze, making Reynolds the second main event in the series.
Geist said, “It’s been an amazing decade, and I feel very, very lucky to be on this ride.” That sentiment fit the size of the crowd and the moment: a full house in Manhattan for a show built around a long-running interview format now old enough to measure in milestones.
Reynolds used the stage to talk about his father Jim’s long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He said his father was diagnosed around 25 years ago, and that his family did not initially recognize hallucinations and delusions as symptoms of the illness. Reynolds has been a board member of the Michael J. Fox Foundation for approximately 15 years, and his remarks placed the discussion squarely in the middle of that advocacy work.
The tension in the story is that a light, celebrity-driven live event became a vehicle for something far more serious. Sunday Sitdown LIVE was built to draw a crowd, but the night’s emotional center came from Reynolds’ account of the disease’s toll and the way it can hide in plain sight inside a family. For Geist, the live event also underscored that the franchise that started in 2018 has become durable enough to carry both entertainment and substance on the same stage.
Tomorrow night’s NBC special will put that mix in front of a much larger audience, and it shows where the franchise has landed after 10 years: no longer just a podcast, but a live, sellout-format interview brand with enough reach to turn a Manhattan stage into a network event.
