Quip smart

Beneath his urbane manner and leading man looks, Ryan Reynolds says he is a jumble of nerves. The pleasure at turning his pet project Deadpool into a smash hit film is tempered by the pressure to deliver on the sequel, he tells Cara Buckley. Portrait by M

Ryan Reynolds on facing his anxiety, the positives of flop Green Lantern and the pressure to deliver with Deadpool 2

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 meet at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, California 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 says as the hotel suite fills with an Angeleno sunshine that perfectly matches 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 is 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 antihero 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 – 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 includes 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 opened to towering anticipation – it broke ticket presale records for a 15 rated movie – and the bigger question of whether Reynolds could catch lightning in a bottle twice.

“When there’s built-in expectation,” he says, “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.

But it comes with some baggage. The first film’s director, Tim Miller, exited, reportedly after Reynolds, who was a producer on both films and a writer on the second, fought against making the sequel a megabudget project. Last summer, a stuntwoman died during production, and in April one of its cast members, TJ Miller, was charged with falsely calling in a bomb threat. There had previously been calls to replace TJ Miller when past allegations of sexual assault surfaced last year. (Reynolds will not comment on TJ Miller but says he will not be in Deadpool’s next film, X-force).

In March, FX cancelled a Deadpool animated adult comedy series by Donald Glover, who created Atlanta. The show was not connected to the film, but Reynolds says he still lamented the news and considers Glover a genius.

“I would’ve loved to have seen what he did with that,” Reynolds says.

On the day we met, Reynolds had been up since dawn, poring over final edits and tweaks on the film. If he is exhausted, it doesn’t show. Wearing a suede coat over a crisp blue T-shirt, his tawny hair swept up from his long boyish face, he evokes Tintin reimagined by Ralph Lauren. As his

Deadpool co-star, Leslie Uggams, tells 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 says has long surprised people he meets. After he starred in National

Lampoon’s Van Wilder (2002), about a college student, ebullient 20-somethings approached him in bars offering Jägermeister shots, only to discover, crestfallen, that he was “this incredibly boring version of a guy who looked like their hero,” he says.

“Offstage, he’s not bigger than life,” Uggams says. “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 says it gives 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 says. He now holds two passports and is a dual citizen, having recently been naturalised in the United States.

“I feel the compulsion to vote,” he says, and then lets a beat pass before whispering, conspiratorially, “Especially now.”

Reynolds is also viciously funny.