Ryan reynolds
Rolling the dice on Deadpool and Mississippi Grind.
When it comes to making movies, Ryan Reynolds has never been one to play it safe. “I wouldn’t say I have any game plan, that I sit back and go, ‘Well, I really need to focus on being the biggest fucking movie star on planet Earth,’” he jokes as we chat to him in sunny Los Angeles. “I don’t do that. I’ve never played that. I would make a terrible biggest fucking movie star on Earth.”
Clearly, he’s being modest. In the past 20 years, the 38-year-old Canadian has proved himself one of Hollywood’s most intriguing players, taking punts on the good ( Buried), the bad ( R.I.P.D.) and the ugly ( Green
Lantern), and gamely accepting the successes alongside the failures. Even when he’s played a character who had viewers swearing through mouthfuls of popcorn (as with Deadpool in 2008’s disappointing X-Men Origins:
Wolverine), he comes up trumps, transforming into an ambassador for that character’s own spin-off movie and promising to get it right second time out.
The $1.4bn his films have taken worldwide is proof he’s doing something right and, if popularity is gauged by number of Twitter followers alone, Reynolds’ half a million aren’t to be sniffed at. It’s here that his refreshingly self-deprecating brand of humour is most evident; in response to one tweeter confused about movie stars called Ryan, Reynolds recently clarified: “Ryan Gosling has light blond hair. And Ryan Reynolds is a c**t.”
Humour has always been the actor’s calling card. “Comedy was my first love,” he admits, but in his latest film, indie drama Mississippi Grind, his turn as crumpled, manic, motor-mouthed gambler Curtis finds Reynolds’ natural affinity for comedy simmering under a layer of melancholy. Disheveled, unshaven, dark circles under his eyes, his Curtis looks, frankly, a bit of a state as he hops into a beaten up Subaru with fellow crap-shooter Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn) and blazes across the belly of the United States.
Playing cards, telling tales and trading blows, Curtis and Gerry are kindred spirits whose addictions – to gambling, to illicit substances – begin to pull apart their budding friendship. Where Reynolds’ best-received indies Buried (one man, one coffin) and The Voices (one man, many severed heads) put the spotlight firmly on him, though,
Mississippi Grind is an intense two-hander between him and star-on-the-rise Mendelsohn (riveting in Animal Kingdom, next headlining Star Wars spin-off Rogue One).
“It was love at first sight,” Reynolds says of meeting the Aussie actor, who he spent four and a half weeks with in January 2014, shooting the film on the fly during a road trip from Iowa to New Orleans. “We moved from state to state in a car that we were actually using in the film, and we had a cameraman in the back. Some days we would go from Alabama to Mississippi to Louisiana. We would just hop in the car together. The cameraman would be in the back seat and he would just film us talking.”
Shepherded by writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck ( Half Nelson, Sugar), the duo revelled in the free-wheeling style of filmmaking (“we didn’t even have trailers, we didn’t want any of that stuff”), and their characters’ fraught pairing harks back to intimate ’70s classics like Midnight Cowboy and The Gambler. “They’re both guys in their own version of a torture shame spiral, to some degree,” Reynolds says. “But it’s kind of funny watching them move across the US like a wrecking ball. I mean, they’re really falling apart as they go. For some reason, there’s something incredibly charming about watching smart characters fall apart.”
If the seat-of-their-pants approach to shooting seemed dicey, Reynolds’ next film makes Mississippi Grind look like
“we’ve made deadpool in the way it should have been made”
a safe bet. In uber-violent superhero actioner
Deadpool, Reynolds reprises the ‘Merc with a Mouth’ anti-hero he played in X-Men Origins:
Wolverine. But while the character’s treatment at that movie’s climax (bald head, sewn-up mouth) earned considerable fan ire, Reynolds has spent the better part of a decade attached to a spin-off.
That in itself seems a bit of a gamble, not least because Reynolds’ comic-book movie history is patchy at best. There’s a sense, though, that he’s finally found the perfect superhero in Deadpool – one whose dark humour and impressive physicality plays to the actor’s strengths. With Reynolds guaranteeing that
Deadpool will stick to the gallows humour and fourth-wall-breaking spirit of the comics, he has the fans on side, too. “The mouth is not at any point in our film sewn shut,” he assured them at Comic-Con in July, taking a break from filming in Vancouver with director Tim Miller. And when the red-band
Deadpool trailer landed in August – showing off the titular, cancer-riddled anti-hero quipping and flipping automobiles – the positive online reaction validated Reynolds’ dedication to getting the film made. He’ll take little credit for it, though. “There’s been a lot of talk about how I was instrumental in getting it made, which isn’t true at all,” he says modestly. “I wouldn’t say I spent every single day emailing the studio heads at Fox saying, ‘You’ve got to make this movie.’”
He did lend his voice to test footage that leaked online in July 2014, though. “The fans are the ones that saw that leaked test footage – which really was never meant for anyone besides in-house studio people. That’s really what got it made,” he says. “But what I’m most proud of is we got to make the movie in the way it should have been made, which is rated R at a very modest budget.”
While 2016 is packed full of other superheroes, Deadpool is first out of the stalls, opening in February,
a whole month before Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice (and Captain America: Civil War and X-Men: Apocalypse are both close on his heels). Reynolds isn’t intimidated, though. “I mean, Deadpool’s greatest superpower is annoying the shit out of people, so I imagine that he would spark a heavy wave of ire from any one of those groups,” he jokes of what would happen if Deadpool ever met his competitors.
As his forties loom, it’s clear Reynolds is an actor increasingly comfortable playing by his own rules. Now married (to Gossip Girl star Blake Lively) and father to their nine-month-old baby daughter James, he’s not interested in the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles, preferring the more even keel of New York. “When you’re in Los Angeles, there’s a tendency to feel like you’re in the high-school cafeteria all day,” he says. And with nothing apart from a cameo in CIA thriller
Criminal on the agenda after Deadpool, it seems Reynolds is taking a moment to reflect before he rolls the dice again.
“I wish I had more opportunities like this,” he admits of Mississippi Grind, hinting indie cinema is where his heart really lies. “To be perfectly honest, a lot of times they’re offered to other guys before they’re offered to me. I love the physicality of disappearing into a role. In the studio system, the last thing they want you to do is disappear into the role. They want a version of you that has tested high.” He pauses, then adds with the certainty of a man used to the risks of working in the entertainment industry: “At the end of the day, if you have any fucking sense in between your ears, you’re just grateful that you’re a working actor.”