Ryan Reynolds Is Already Worried About This Story
BEVERLY HILLS, California — You’d never know it from the smooth- operator vibes and handsomeness that radiate from his magazine covers, but Ryan Reynolds is often, quite secretly, a nervous wreck.
He gets racked 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.”
At the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills late one afternoon in April, he had barely eaten all day, because interviews make him crazy jittery, too.
“I have anxiety, I’ve always had anxiety,” Mr. Reynolds, 41, said. “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 life, and wife, are fawned over in celebrity magazines, 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 humor after a lifetime of alchemizing comedy out of angst.
“Deadpool,” largely unknown, cost $58 million — far less than most superhero movies — and was marketed with a grass-roots campaign that included viral videos, silly billboards and Mr. Reynolds’s wry promotional tweets. (“There will be blood. Guns. F- bombs. And graphic, expertly lit French unicorn sex.”)
The film earned $783 million worldwide, landing two Golden Globe nominations and makingMr. Reynolds one of GQ’s 2016 Men of the Year.
It also marked a true phoenixfrom- the- ashes moment for Mr. Reynolds, whose high-profile relationships — an engagement to the singer Alanis Morissette, a threeyear marriage to Scarlett Johansson — have sometimes overshadowed a hit-and-miss career that included the 2011 superhero flop, “Green Lantern.”
“Deadpool 2,” which opened worldwide in mid-May, broke ticket presale records for an R-rated film.
In person, Mr. Reynolds is much more contained and low-key than his many outsize screen personae. After he starred in “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder” (2002), about a seventh-year college student, 20-somethings approached him in bars offering Jägermeister shots, 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,” said his “Deadpool” co- star, Leslie Uggams. “He’s not Mr. Hollywood.”
Part of the reason is that, like Deadpool, Mr. Reynolds is Canadian. He is also funny.
The internet is full of assorted compendiums of his best tweets — he has 10.6 million followers — many about the two young daughters he has with his wife, Blake Lively. ( The couple are raising their family north of New York City.) Much of this humor, he said, is rooted in self- defense mechanisms he learned as a kid growing up as the youngest of four boys in Vancouver, British Columbia. His father, Jim Reynolds, a former police officer-turned-food wholesaler, was “the stress dispensary in our house,” Mr. Reynolds said.
His father was also quite the character. He made red wine in a garbage pail in the basement, terrible, noxious stuff, the actor said. But he also introduced him to comedy greats like Buster Keaton and Jack Benny.
Out of all this, he learned to plumb tragedy for the absurd. ( His father had Parkinson’s disease and died in 2015.)
After high school, Mr. Reynolds headed to Los Angeles, where he joined a sketch troupe. His early 20s were tumultuous; he calls them his “real unhinged phase.” He frequently awoke in the middle of the night, paralyzed by anxiety, agonizing over his future. He got through it by self-medicating, but after a few friends died of overdoses, he toned down the partying.
Bigger roles followed, and smaller ones, and bigger ones again. Before “Deadpool,” his most critically acclaimed films were also largely unseen, dramas like the indie “Buried” in 2010, and “Mississippi Grind” in 2015. Although “Green Lantern” fizzled, he discovered that the leading-man archetype didn’t suit him, and that he was more inclined to lampoon it, which he does during the closing credits of “Deadpool 2.”
Mr. Reynolds, who uses the meditation app Headspace, said the second he walks onstage, he knows that the anxiety will lift.
“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 self- defense mechanism. I figure if you’re going to jump off a cliff, you might as well fly.”