Ryan Reynolds

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Behind the scenes with actor Ryan Reynolds :-)

 

 

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The first thing Ryan Reynolds would like you to know about having kids is: Don’t listen to what Ryan Reynolds thinks about having kids. “Picture advice being loaded into Super Soakers,” he says, grinning. He looks me up and down—I’m 33, about to be married, on the brink of it. “You’re running around all dry and fancy-free—you’re gonna be, like, drenched,” he warns me. “The one piece of advice I would say is: Don’t listen to any advice. Because there’s nothing you can do to prepare for it.”

 

Reynolds is 38 and on his eight or ninth Hollywood lifetime—he’s been the cult-comedy guy from Van Wilder and the romantic-comedy guy from The Proposal and the guy in a CGI suit talking to a tennis ball in Green Lantern. He’s been the next big thing more times than he can count. But right now his life can be summed up in far more elemental terms. There’s the rustic house about an hour of north of New York City, where he and his wife, Blake Lively, have chosen to live and raise their daughter, James. And then there’s the baby-monitor app on his iPhone, which buzzes every couple seconds as we sit upstairs in the renovated barn next to the main house. “This is your future right here,” he says, showing me the cascade of alerts on his phone. James is 8 months old and about a hundred feet away, with her mother. And that’s what’s become of Ryan Reynolds.

 

“I’ve learned that an inordinate amount of clichés are completely true,” he says. “Like, there is this kid here that I would walk through fire for. Or maybe not fire. Like, a very hot pavement, I’d walk through. A shag rug.”

 

Are you the father you hoped you’d be?

 

 

 

“I think I am, yeah. I can’t say I had an easy relationship with my father, and I can’t say my brothers did either, but I look at each of my older brothers, and they’re all fathers, and they’re all great fathers. So I had some good examples. But I don’t think you really necessarily need examples. You just try to not be a complete pile of shit and just be there for them. You know, I like it: I mean that in the heaviest context. I genuinely like it. I like being a father. I like having a daughter. I would like to have more kids. You know, it seems to suit me pretty well.”

 

Did that surprise you?

 

“I’m surprised how patient I am with it. I feel like I could sometimes have a bit of a short fuse, but there’s just been this weirdly endless supply of patience. I have no problem waking up five times in the middle of the night and changing diapers, and as exhausted as you get, I have this stupid grin on my face all the time. And that’s not because I have a nanny or something like that. It’s just us right now, and I love it.”

 

You were talking about having complicated feelings about the way you were raised. Does having a kid change that?

 

“Yeah, in a lot of different ways that I think are cool. One is that you become a lot more forgiving. Once you have a kid, you just think, like, ‘I can’t believe that another person did all this shit for me, that I’m doing for this person right now!’ Like, that somebody woke up in the middle of the night this many times just to wipe my ass. It’s just profound to me. So you start to have a great deal more respect for your own parents. Not that I didn’t already. But I don’t know how my parents did it with four kids. Four boys! Who basically did everything short of setting their own home on fire every single day of their lives. It’s gotta be pretty intense.”

 

What have you learned about yourself from the experience so far?

 

“There are a million clichés that are just true. I get why parents have that sort of predisposition to talk about their child as if they’re the only people that have ever copulated and pumped out a kid. I understand that. I don’t fucking fall victim to it, because, especially celebrities, when they talk about their kid, they talk about their kid like they’re the Chosen One, or they’re the only people who have ever had a child.”

 

“Let me tell you about this thing called childbirth.”

 

“Oh, man. Honestly, I’ve really seen that line. I find it to be really obnoxious. In fact, every time I talk about my kid in public, I’m generally talking about how average she is. But at home, I’m like, ‘You’re a genius! Oh, my God! You just took a shit in your diaper that came out as a perfect musical note!’ ”

 

Do you miss your old life? You can’t just take a spontaneous trip anymore.

 

“I didn’t miss it until you fucking said it like that, no.”

 

This spring, Lively posted an Instagram photo of Reynolds carrying James in a baby carrier, and apparently James’s feet were together when they should’ve been separated or something, who knows really, and the couple found themselves being harangued by millions of mommy bloggers. “Please read your baby product manuals with as much detail as you read a script”—someone really left that comment on Lively’s Instagram. Matt Lauer even grilled Reynolds about the incident on The Today Show.

 

And it’s funny, because you can tell you’re answering through gritted teeth.

 

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“Yeah, ‘Can I just make some mistakes and all of you just fuck off?’ Yeah. You want to be able to say that. But you can’t say that. There is almost no community on Earth as intense as the parent-child online community.”

 

It was as if the existence of a child spawned by Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively drove people around them crazy, like actually crazy, and there was a two-week stretch near the beginning when Reynolds wondered if it was always going to be like this.

 

First he got hit by a car. It was April, a few months after his kid was born, and he was in Vancouver, shooting Deadpool. “I was in an underground parking garage that…The guy has yet to appear in court, so I don’t even know if I can talk about it. But, yeah, I was hit by a car.” That was drama enough—a paparazzo striking Ryan Reynolds with his car. (He was fine.)

 

But that wasn’t the worst part. “A guy that I’d known for my whole life, one of my closest friends growing up, he had been shopping pictures of my baby around. I kind of got in front of it, which is good. But it was a slightly dark period. A bad couple of weeks.”

 

This was somebody you knew well?

 

“Somebody I grew up with, yeah. Somebody I’ve known, who’s been one of my closest friends, for 25 years.”

 

Was that an experience you’d had before, being betrayed by someone like that?

 

“No. It was like a death. It was like one of those devastating things to find out.”

 

Did you have a conversation about it?

 

“Yeah. Yeah. It was a pretty strongly worded conversation.”

 

Did he do it for money?

 

“Yeah, just for money. I mean, I don’t think he thought he would ever be caught. But it’s a pretty narrow group of people that I would send photos like that to. They’re just, like, my closest family and my closest friends: ‘Here’s us in the delivery room!’ ”

 

Were you like, “Next time you need a check, just ask”?

 

“Well, I think he’d asked for a check enough times where I was like, ‘There’s no more checks to be had.’ ”

 

Probably no more baby pictures, either.

 

“No. It was, like, so kind of shocking. There isn’t really a conversation to have. It’s just, ‘Oh, well, now I’m never going to see you or talk to you again, unfortunately.’ That’s kind of how it worked out.”

 

Reynolds figures the paparazzi guy hit him because he was trying to get a photo of his daughter before the one his buddy was shopping came out. “The whole thing becomes so absurd that all you can do is laugh about it and just go, ‘This isn’t the real world. This isn’t how real things work.’ But it happens to be happening right now. And it will pass. And it does. It passes. It all passed.”

 

Ryan Reynolds’s most recent film, just coming out now, is called Mississippi Grind. Him and Ben Mendelsohn, playing two broken, compulsive gamblers on the road, California Split-style, finding refuge in each other. Reynolds’s character is mouthy, a little bit caustic, but almost pathologically good-hearted and likeable—attributes he shares with the actor playing him. The role seems liberating for Reynolds; he doesn’t have to show off his abs, or his jawline, or even topline the movie, and you can see the delight he takes in that freedom. He’s charismatic in the film the way he was in Adventureland and Van Wilder and all the other cult hits that have maintained his reputation as an actor worth watching even when more high-profile stuff like R.I.P.D. failed him.

 

Mississippi Grind concludes a run of smaller, more auteur-oriented movies—Tarsem Singh’s Self/less, Atom Egoyan’s The Captive, Marjane Satrapi’s The Voices, and Simon Curtis’s Woman in Gold—for Reynolds, who says his flight from bigger studio films was mostly unintentional. But he is aware of the perception that blockbuster Hollywood, for lack of a better term, has sometimes been unkind to his career. There is a very pointed Green Lantern joke in the trailer for Deadpool, the six-years-in-the-making, passion project/comic-book film he will star in early next year. And there is an even more pointed Ryan Reynolds joke in another Deadpool teaser, which advertises its star as “five-time Academy Award viewer Ryan Reynolds.” The line came from Reynolds himself.

 

Is there a secret note of pain in that joke?

 

“A little bit, yeah. But that’s what makes it funny, I think. I wish I was a five-time Academy Award winner. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night at a perfect right angle thinking, why have I not been nominated for five Academy Awards? I can pretty much tell you why.”

 

Why?

 

“That hasn’t been the chief sort of goal for me at all. I mean, even if it was the chief goal for me, I don’t know if I could ever be in that ring. I have no idea.”

 

Doing smaller, more semi-independent films: Has that been a deliberate choice?

 

“Not particularly. It’s not not deliberate. But I find that, like, studio movies have always been much more deliberate choices. You just never know. I’ve done big movies that just absolutely sucked, once they were finally cut together and put up on the big screen. And I’ve done small movies where the same thing can happen. You just never know. I do have faith in directors. I believe that film is a director’s medium.”

 

That’s something you say a lot. The unspoken part being that you’ve had to learn that lesson through some not-great experiences with directors, right?

 

“Yes! There have been some hard-earned experiences with respect to that. But I have to take whatever responsibility I have to take, too. I’m not just saying, ‘Oh, it was them’ or ‘They fucked this up.’ I also chose it, you know. There’s my face up there the whole time. I made those choices.”

 

One of the things I liked about Mississippi Grind, for instance, is how well you cede the screen to Ben Mendelsohn. It’s your face up there, but there’s also his.

 

“Well, yeah, but I’ve done a lot of movies where the person I was co-starring with is a massive star, and [its underperformance is] still, for some reason, it’s my fault.”

 

Such as?

 

“I don’t even want to say. Actors get an undeserved amount of credit when a movie works. The same is true when it doesn’t work. So you kind of take the good with the bad.”

 

I just watched Self/less—

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

—which came out a month ago but is already out of theaters. This is a lousy question, but: The amount of time and effort and energy that you put into that film, to see it already gone, what is that experience like?

 

“It’s always weird. Like, you know, it sounds like a cliché, but the journey is the reward. You want movies to work, and sometimes they don’t. Movies are an intersection of a number of different talents, and sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t, and it’s just…are you asking, like, am I lying awake at night going, ‘Why didn’t that work?’ No. Not at all.”

 

Why did you just say “I’m sorry”?

 

“I was mostly just kidding. Because the movie didn’t turn out as well as I think I wanted, or Tarsem wanted. But, you know, at the same time, I can’t speak for them. Maybe it turned out exactly how they wanted it.”

 

Last year at Cannes, you were there with Atom Egoyan for The Captive, and he told The Hollywood Reporter, “One of the things I’m most proud of with this film is it will completely redefine Ryan’s career.” [Reynolds laughs] What is your reaction when people say stuff like that?

 

“When you’re saying something to a reporter in the press, the same way I am right now—like, I’m talking to you, but I’m also clocking what I’m saying and how I’m saying it, looking for the ‘Gotcha’ moment, because there’s this tendency to have this ‘Gotcha’ journalism these days. And honestly, coming over here, I get fucking nervous, because I’m just like, ‘What am I gonna say that I’m gonna, in a month from now, go like, Wait, did I fucking say that?’ So, yeah, I don’t know what Atom’s saying there. It’s one interview of a fucking hundred he probably did that day, where he’s saying something—yeah, you could look at that and go, like, ‘Well, what about my career needs to be redefined?’ But for a lot of people, if you look at me, maybe my career needs to be redefined. Maybe, like, they think, ‘Oh, he’s better than the movies that he does,’ or, you know, ‘Maybe he’s just perfect for the movies that he does,’ or maybe not. I don’t know. That’s all just sort of like subjective nonsense. And I know Atom personally. I love Atom. And so when Atom says something like that, and—I can tell that you take it, like, well, ‘Isn’t that offensive to you, or is that upsetting to you’…?”

 

I did think it might be offensive to you.

 

“Yeah, it doesn’t bother me, because I know what it’s like to do a hundred and fifty interviews in a day. And I know how difficult that is, and I know that you say stuff that—like, if I called him about that, he would, I’m sure, say, ‘Oh, my God, I had no idea it came out that way.’ I can think of probably a dozen times that I’ve jammed both of my feet in my mouth in an interview where I just thought, ‘That was never my intention, to say something about somebody else like that.’ Even now, talking about Tarsem, I’m like, ‘Am I gonna read that and go, oh, that’s offensive to Tarsem?’ I mean, to be perfectly frank, I dread these things, because I really want to, like, relax and just, like, have a conversation, but at the same time, I am a veteran of this gig enough to know that I can’t do that.”

 

Stanley Tucci once suggested that your curse was that you’re a character actor trapped in a leading man’s body.

 

“Yeah, that’s an uptown problem, I would say. But no, I love it—because the character roles are the ones that get to be more outrageous. They’re the ones that are imbued with a lot more character. They’re the ones that get to take weird risks, because the whole film isn’t hinged upon their ultimate redemption, like it is for the leading role. Because the audience doesn’t have to like me.”

 

Are there times when you’re happy to headline a movie?

 

“Yeah. Deadpool, I loved doing that. That’s sort of a dream come true for me. But again, he’s funny and acerbic and a little bit of a head case. But he’s also not trying to be liked. He’s intentionally trying to annoy everyone.”

 

Was part of you reluctant to go back to superhero movies?

 

“A little bit. But Deadpool was different because there wasn’t a big budget attached to it. There was not a tremendous responsibility to meet some kind of bottom line. Those kinds of superhero movies when you’re out front, there’s a vast and quite frightening budget attached to them. This one had a super-reasonable budget, and it was subversive and a little bit different, and to me a little refreshing in the comic-book world. But you always have trepidation. When you’re out front, you have trepidation.”

 

In the Deadpool trailer, he makes that very pointed joke about not wanting his suit to be green. It made me wonder: What if Green Lantern had actually been successful? Would that have been a good thing or a bad thing for you?

 

“I mean, I don’t give a rusty fuck, because—I know that this is gonna sound like some sort of guy who’s spent a little bit of time in a monastery or something, but it all led to here. If I had to do it all again, I’d do the exact same thing. You know, also, Green Lantern—you gotta remember, at the time, everyone was gunning for that role. The guys I was screen-testing against are amazing talents. [Reynolds reportedly beat out Bradley Cooper, Justin Timberlake, and Jared Leto for the role.] But would I change it? No! And if it was as big a success, then it might have offered a whole different avenue of opportunities, or maybe I would just be kind of always that guy. I really don’t know.”

 

You’d be on Green Lantern 3 right now.

 

“Yeah, for sure. I think I would be probably in prep for Green Lantern 3 right now. That sounds about right.”

 

A couple of years ago you said, “Every time I’ve gotten myself into trouble, it’s because I’m choosing a project based on a long-term career goal as opposed to something that speaks to me at the moment.” What was the long-term career goal there?

 

“I think stability. You always want some semblance of stability. I think everyone does. Particularly if your endgame goal is to have a family and have some semblance of routine and normalcy. You know, it’s stability, I think. And that can be dangerous. Because it’s an illusion.”

 

So you don’t feel like you’re chasing that stability anymore?

 

“No, no, no. I really don’t have any immediate or long-term plans, actually, to be perfectly frank. I’ve sort of, in a great way, kind of surrendered to the idea that it’s just gonna be the way it’s gonna be. And I’m gonna work as hard as I’ve always worked. Even on movies that didn’t work, I’ve worked really, really hard. And all the people around you are working really, really hard. But sometimes that creates dysfunction. So you have a hundred and fifty people that are working very hard at something in different directions, and it creates something that doesn’t work.”

 

Especially on the bigger things.

 

“Yeah! Absolutely. And then sometimes that friction can cause something amazing to happen. But that’s more on smaller movies. Because in the bigger movies they’re not willing to have any degree of risk. So there’s no room for the character to be divisive in any way. They have to fulfill some kind of illusory ideal of the perfect man, you know, particularly in superhero films. And you look at them now, and I think why a lot of them are working is that Marvel in particular handles those properties really well. You know, they really know what they’re doing, and they know how to appeal to a vast audience in a way that also has some real artistic merit, too. Then there’s other people that are just totally fatigued by the superhero genre.”

 

Deadpool will arrive at an interesting moment for Reynolds, who will once again headline a large-ish studio film, and for comic-book movies in general. The week we talk, Fantastic Four has just shattered into a thousand brittle pieces at the box office, cooling the ascent, at least temporarily, of a bright young cast that includes Miles Teller and Michael B. Jordan—the end of a long summer of indifferent reactions for high-profile Marvel projects like Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man.

 

You were talking about audience fatigue. You look at this summer and you have Avengers: Age of Ultron and Joss Whedon coming out after directing that film and saying, in effect, “I think I’m dead.” [Whedon to the L.A. Times: “It’s weird because the first one was very, very, very hard. This one was much harder. It a little bit broke me.”]

 

“Yeah. ‘I’ve legally passed away.’ ”

 

And then just last week, you had Fantastic Four really fail spectacularly. I’d be curious what your take is: Do you think that’s audience exhaustion, or do you think there’s something about the machine that’s breaking down right now?

 

“It’s a genre. There are good horror movies and bad horror movies. There are good comedies and bad comedies. Think of it like that. Think of it less about just superheroes. I do believe that they explore similar archetypes a lot, so I think that notion can be somewhat fatiguing, maybe. I think one of the reasons that Deadpool has gained a lot of momentum isn’t just that it’s funny or isn’t just that it’s rated R. The meta aspect is very important. So I think Deadpool’s coming along at the right time, because it’s also speaking to that generation and that group of people that have seen them all, seen all these comic-book films and enjoyed them all to varying degrees of success. But I think it’s speaking to them as though the guy in that red suit is one of them, to some degree.”

 

The guy who’s watching the more conventional superheroes and sort of wisecracking along.

 

“Yeah. It’s like there’s an element of, like, watching a DVD commentary by someone who’s got some pop-culture savvy and is kind of funny and a little obnoxious and is saying the things that you maybe wouldn’t say. It’s fun. That’s also why the film is budgeted the way it’s budgeted, is released the way it’s released, is allowed to be rated R, kind of all these things. Because for the studio, it’s actually relatively low-risk.”

 

What do you think when you see young, bright, up-and-coming actors in Hollywood steered relentlessly into these franchises?

 

“A lot of them are incredible artists, and they need to have a franchise in order to pursue a lot of the other interests that they may have. It works as a bit of a conduit to the material that they want to be pursuing when they’re not shooting the big franchise.”

 

I wonder if their commitment to the big franchise films actually prevents them from working on the type of material they want to be working on, because of sequels, contractual obligations, that sort of thing.

 

“Maybe. But then again—interestingly, thank God, there’s more and more opportunities for women now than there was. Obviously there’s a pay gap and an age gap in Hollywood that’s kind of insane and at some point needs to be remedied, inch by inch or mile by mile. But, you know, Jennifer Lawrence, she’s a movie star. I personally would go see a movie based exclusively on the fact that she’s in it.”

 

But she’s also in two franchises. And you look at a guy like Miles Teller, who had Whiplash and seems so talented, and now is in this Fantastic Four maelstrom. That’s how we rewarded that guy. We rewarded Michael B. Jordan for being amazing in all his films with—

 

“But I’m more frustrated about the Michael B. Jordan aspect than Miles Teller. You know, Miles Teller’s gonna recover. Miles Teller’s gonna go on to do amazing things, you know. It’s important that Michael B. Jordan continues to go on and do amazing things.”

 

And you feel like they’ll make it harder for a black actor than for a white one?

 

“I know it’s not easy for a black actor. It’s not easy for a female actor. It’s not easy for a lot of people that are... That entire cast is amazingly talented. And I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. I mean, I know what that feels like. It doesn’t feel good. And it also is difficult, because you don’t feel like you can control that outcome. You know, as much as you want to. You can’t really.”

 

Deadpool is in many ways both the comic-book project and the Ryan Reynolds project people have been waiting for—irreverent, wisecracking, subversive, not too taken with itself. Reynolds was first attached to the film in 2005, he says; the script was begun in 2009; and the film’s director, Tim Miller, joined in 2011. It’s been a long time coming, in other words, even by Hollywood standards.

 

It must have felt really good on the first day of shooting.

 

“Yeah! Oh, I made sure we marked it, too. Like, we just started rolling, and I was like, ‘No, no, hold on.’ We went in the other room and we huddled up: ‘We’re making this movie! We’ve been trying to get this movie made for six fucking years, and here we are. We’re doing it right now. Just remember this second. Just take a moment to be thankful for that.’ And then we all went out and just started shooting and dicking around and had some fun.”

 

[in the corner of the barn is a reddish, Mars-colored bust of Reynolds’s face, wrinkled and covered in scars.]

 

That’s a Deadpool bust, right?

 

“That’s my scarred face, yeah.”

 

Is it liberating to do a movie in which your face looks like that?

 

“Oh, really liberating, yeah. Because the character is called the Merc with a Mouth, and you have to explain that somehow. He can’t just be this guy who’s walking around and looks like a normal guy who’s just super-obnoxious. There has to be a reason for it. And the reason for it is because he looks like that.”

 

I’m sure your face is in the beginning—

 

“You see a little bit of it, yeah, on his road to looking like a fried taint.”

 

Have you ever had that experience before, where you’re the star of the movie but your face isn’t really in the movie?

 

“Um…have I ever had that experience? I don’t know. I have trouble keeping track of all of that. I have to confess, there’s a ton of films I’ve done that I’ve never seen. I just saw Adventureland recently. I loved it. I thought it was a really good film.”

 

Could you still enjoy the movie, even though you were in it?

 

“Well, yes, because I’m watching it objectively. I’m not really seeing myself, or I’m not really seeing, ‘Oh, there’s that trick I’ll do in that moment to convey this kind of emotion.’ You can’t remember any of that crap. So you just watch it. And that’s nice.”

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QocDvWYbf7w

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Ryan Reynolds Visits "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" at Rockefeller Center on September 21, 2015 in New York City.

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NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 21: Ryan Reynolds attends Meet The Actor: Ryan Reynolds, 'Mississippi Grind' at Apple Store Soho on September 21, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Rob Kim/Getty Images)

 

 

 

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NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 21: Actor Ryan Reynolds is seen in Soho on September 21, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Raymond Hall/GC Images)

 

 

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Ryan Reynolds rocks a pair of thick rimmed glasses ashe steps out of his hotel on Monday afternoon (September 21) in New York City.

The same day, the 38-year-old actor made an appearance at the Apple store to discuss his movie Mississippi Grind.

That eveing, Ryan paid a visit to The Tonight Show where he played an intense game of slapjack with host Jimmy Fallon.

justjared

 

 

 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3A_cAyYaN8

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NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 22: Actor Ryan Reynolds attends The Film Society of Lincoln Center sneak previews 'Mississippi Grind' at The Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theatre on September 22, 2015 in New York City.

Source: getty