Look who’s back
Hollywood star Ryan Reynolds returns as everyone’s favourite merc with a mouth in ‘Deadpool 2’, out in the UAE on Thursday
You’d never know it from the smooth-operator vibes and Disney prince handsomeness that radiate from his magazine covers, but Ryan Reynolds is often, quite secretly, a nervous wreck.
He gets wracked by dread and nausea before every talk-show appearance and becomes quite convinced he might die. During his ABC sitcom days, he chose to warm up the audience, partly to ingratiate himself, but mostly to redirect his panic or, as he describes it, “the energy of just wanting to throw up.”
When we met at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills late one afternoon in April, he had barely eaten all day, because interviews for profiles make him crazy jittery too. “I have anxiety, I’ve always had anxiety,” Reynolds said as the hotel suite filled with an Angeleno sunshine that perfectly matched his golden latte-hued self. “Both in the lighthearted ‘I’m anxious about this’ kind of thing, and I’ve been to the depths of the darker end of the spectrum, which is not fun.”
It was quite the admission from a man whose outwardly sun-kissed life, and wife, are fawned over in celebrity rags, and who, in 2010, was named
People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive. Then again, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that the guy behind the near pitch perfect 2016 blockbuster
Deadpool, about a sardonic Marvel anti-hero with a twisted mind and a filthy mouth, could only have developed his wicked brand of humour after a lifetime of alchemising comedy out of angst.
Now Reynolds, who is 41, faces the moment movie franchisers dream of: the sequel. The stakes are much higher this time around. Deadpool, a passion project for Reynolds 11 years in the making, was largely unknown, cost just $58 million (Dh213 million) — far less than most superhero movies — and was marketed with a grass-roots campaign that included viral videos, very silly billboards and Reynolds’ wry promotional tweets. (“There will be blood. Guns. F-bombs. And graphic, expertly lit French unicorn sex.”) It ended up being a surprise hit, earning $783 million worldwide, landing two Golden Globe nominations and making Reynolds one of GQ’s 2016 Men of the Year.
It also marked a true phoenix-fromthe-ashes moment for Reynolds, whose high-profile relationships — an engagement to singer Alanis Morissette, a three-year marriage to Scarlett Johansson — have sometimes overshadowed a hit-and-miss career that included the 2011 superhero clunker,
Green Lantern, a film he describes as “the hair shirt I’ll wear.”
While Deadpool had less on the line, its runaway success meant that
Deadpool 2 will open to towering anticipation — it has already broken ticket presale records for an R-rated movie — and the bigger question of whether Reynolds can catch lightning in a bottle twice. “When there’s builtin expectation,” he said, “your brain always processes that as danger.”
The sequel more or less takes up where the original left off and again presents its protagonist with an existential crisis and a deeply personal cause, an approach that helped make the first one a hit. “Keeping the stakes personal is much more compelling to audiences, instead of global stakes they’ve seen so many times,” said David Leitch, the film’s director.
On the day we met, Reynolds had been up since dawn, poring over final edits and tweaks on the film. If he was exhausted, it didn’t show. Wearing a suede coat over a crisp blue T-shirt, his tawny hair swept up from his long boyish face, he evoked Tintin reimagined by Ralph Lauren. As his Deadpool co-star, Leslie Uggams, told me, “The man is built, the man is handsome, and he takes care of himself.”
He is also much more contained and low-key than his many outsize screen personae suggest, a contrast that he said has long surprised people he meets. After he starred in National
Lampoon’s Van Wilder (2002), about a
seventh-year college student, ebullient 20-somethings approached him in bars, only to discover that he was “this incredibly boring version of a guy who looked like their hero,” he said.
“Offstage, he’s not bigger than life,” Uggams said. “He’s not like the Rock. When the Rock walks in the room, I’m sure it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, the Rock.’ But that’s not Ryan. He’s not Mr. Hollywood.”
Part of the reason Reynolds is not Mr. Hollywood is that, like Deadpool, he is Canadian. The actor proudly adores his home country and said it gave him a slightly outsider’s perspective on moviedom that he uses to his advantage. “I’ve never felt like I’m in it, like this is my game,” he said.
He now holds two passports and is a dual citizen, having recently been naturalised in the US. “I feel the compulsion to vote,” he said, and then let a beat pass before whispering, conspiratorially, “Especially now.”
Reynolds is also viciously funny. The internet is full of assorted compendiums of his best tweets, many about the two young daughters he has with his wife, Blake Lively.
Among them:
“No matter which kids book I read to my screaming baby on an aeroplane, the moral of the story is always something about a vasectomy.”
And: “On our 6am walk, my daughter asked where the moon goes each morning. I let her know it’s in heaven, visiting daddy’s freedom.”
Much of this humour, he said, is rooted in self-defence mechanisms he learnt as a kid. He grew up the youngest of four boys in Vancouver, British Columbia, in a home that was made volatile by his father, Jim Reynolds, a former police officer-turned-food wholesaler whom Reynolds calls “the stress dispensary in our house.”
Yet Reynolds said he didn’t view his childhood with sorrow. Jim Reynolds was difficult but also quite the character, a man who had a welter of scars on one arm from an old tattoo he had burnt off. His father also introduced him to comedy greats like Buster Keaton and Jack Benny, and could perfectly imitate Robert Goulet, or recite any episode of Fawlty Towers.
Out of all this, Reynolds learnt to be watchful, listen closely and to plumb tragedy for the absurd. (His father had Parkinson’s disease and died in 2015. Reynolds serves on the board of the Michael J. Fox Foundation and named his firstborn daughter James after his dad.)
The first time Reynolds remembers making a grown-up laugh was on the set of his first television show, a Canadian teen drama called Hillside. Inspired, he formed a short-lived high school comedy troupe called Yellow Snow and continued to act, but landed jobs so sporadically he considered quitting.
Then he headed south to Los Angeles, signed up with the Groundlings sketch troupe and was hired to star in the 1998-2001 sitcom Two Guys,
a Girl and a Pizza Place as Berg, the resident smart alec. The series was pretty standard issue but showcased Reynolds’ innate comic timing.
But his early 20s were tumultuous; he calls them his “real unhinged phase.”
“I was partying and just trying to make myself vanish in some way,” he said. He frequently awoke in the middle of the night, paralysed by anxiety, agonising about his future. He got through it by self-medicating, but after a few friends died of overdoses, he toned the partying way down.
Before our interview wrapped, I asked him how he deals with anxiety, what with all the promotional interviews and inevitable talk-show appearances ahead. First off, he said, he’s doing a lot of the interviews in character as Deadpool. Also, he uses the meditation app Headspace. And finally, the second he walks onstage, he knows that the anxiety will lift, and then the blessed relief descends.
“When the curtain opens, I turn on this knucklehead, and he kind of takes over and goes away again once I walk off set,” he said. “That’s that great selfdefence mechanism,” he continued. “I figure if you’re going to jump off a cliff, you might as well fly.”