Ryan Reynolds tells Blake Lively we're headed to the war room. More accurately, he tells her we're going to the barn, which sits on an old upstate New York farm that functions as Reynolds's family center and creative headquarters. It was on this estate, which he shares with the very pregnant Lively and their daughter, that he co-wrote the screenplay for Deadpool and where he's currently working on its sequel with co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. This farm—or Reynolds himself, ass planted on the farm, where he seems to be happiest—is the star around which all bodies of the Reynolds system orbit. So although Lively is due literally any minute, Reynolds has chosen to hold this interview here.
That he's able to have a casual chat as the timer is about to ding on his wife's second pregnancy speaks to his experience living like a Mafia don conspiring in the back of a gelato shop. Reynolds's front was a couple of decades of mid-size film hits and clever talk-show appearances. Of course, the hidden racket was Deadpool, which went on to become the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time.
But, like, why? Why Deadpool? Because Deadpool is one of the most unique protagonists to appear in a blockbuster. He's a movie character who's aware of how absurd it is that he's a movie character. A mutant who literally says, "Whose balls did I have to fondle to get my very own movie? I can't tell you, but it does rhyme with Polverine." The comic-book hero who basically asked the rest of the genre: "Why so serious?"
Okay. But how did Reynolds prophesize that audiences would respond to the character he spent 11 grueling years forcing onto movie screens? Because he is one of the most unique figures in Hollywood. He's a movie star who's aware how absurd it is that he's a movie star. A celebrity who poses on the Met Ball red carpet or at Taylor Swift's Fourth of July party and looks into the camera with a smirk that suggests he knows how many of us would fondle balls to be in his position. Reynolds recognized himself in a beloved character and spent a decade persuading doubters to let him blow up the superhero-industrial complex with the role of his lifetime.
Among stacks of cookbooks and a bust of the character who changed his career, Reynolds sits on a sofa, poised to reflect on the magnitude of his accomplishments. But first, he wants to give me shit about a conversation we had in the GQ fashion closet two days ago.…
Ryan Reynolds: Remember how awkward it was when we were talking about my dad?
GQ: I'm so sorry. I didn't know he had passed away. When you said he was "scattered to the wind," I thought you meant, like, metaphorically.
I love situations like that. I really do. I actually didn't know I was stringing you along. I thought you were totally hip to the fact that he was super-dead. But no!
Ugghh. You had just mentioned your estrangement, so I was confused!
I had a rough ten-year patch with my father. So we were estranged. Now we're really estranged. But I actually had that sort of epic moment that only happens in films, where I saw him before he died and closed the loop as much as I could.
As you get older, holding grudges about your childhood starts to feel petty.
We're all just hurtling through space in this green, spinning shit-wheel of devastation. At some point, you just kinda gotta live and let go. I always wanted that father that was like Wilford Brimley, who would put me on his lap and just dispense incredible life advice and guidance, and I would go out into the world and execute it beautifully. From my earliest memory of him, my father was that stereotypical tough guy. But it was just a veneer. The hardest part for me is that he was always kind of a mystery. I just don't feel like I ever had a real conversation with him.
Did you try?
A lot. And I would get an engineered response, like I put a coin in the Response-O-Matic and out would come this fortune cookie–sized answer. I might ask, "What was your first girlfriend like?" He'd say, "She was dandy. Her name was Nancy." And that would be it. I'd be like, "Do you want to try Googling her? Let's see what happened. Maybe she's a serial killer!" I always thought that the great father-son relationships have this kind of Butch-and-Sundance quality.
In a few hours, you're going to be a father of two.
I'm on the precipice of having a real American family. I mean, I always imagined that would happen, and then it happened. Every idiotic Hallmark-card cliché is true.
Speaking of delayed dreams: Why did it take Deadpool so long to happen?
I've been on the train for 11 years trying to get it made. We did every iteration of that script we could to allow them to make the movie that looked vaguely like the movie we wanted to make.
You Trojan-horsed your Deadpool in through a regular superhero script.
We thought, "Okay, if they let us do this, we'll actually shoot this and hopefully they won't notice." Once the test footage leaked, that created a groundswell of support. And the studio responded to that groundswell by saying, "Okay, here's the absolute bare minimum amount of money that we will give this character. Let us know when the movie's done."
I heard you personally paid $20,000 to use a picture of Bea Arthur in the movie.
It was more a question of talking to the estate and the family personally and just reaching out and saying, "We're gonna take care of this." And there was a little donation made to her charity.
What was the charity?
I forget. I may have donated a lot of money to hunting exotic, endangered animals.
You played Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but it seemed like no one was happy with how that went.
It was during a writers' strike, so all my dialogue in that movie I wrote. I mean, in the stage directions it just said, "Deadpool shows up, talks really fast, and makes a lot of jokes." At the beginning of that movie, that's pretty close to Deadpool's Wade Wilson—we're in the ballpark with that guy. But it completely departed all canon and reason, and he wound up being this abomination of Deadpool that was like Barakapool, with his mouth sewn shut and weird blades that came out of his hands and these strange tattoos and stuff like that. If you watch the movie, I'm actually playing only a small section, and another actor, this gifted stunt performer, is doing the lion's share of that work. The conversation at the time was "If you want to play Deadpool, this is your chance to introduce him. And if you don't want to introduce him in this fashion, we'll have someone else play him."
That movie leaked online a month and a half before it was supposed to be released, and all these people saw it and were so upset about Deadpool. I was in Mexico with some friends, and I was called by the chief of the studio, who said, "You have to get on a plane right now. We need to re-shoot the very end of the movie." I was such a douche, because I was like, "I told you so." I still get angry, because I remember saying, "You know, there are more Deadpool fans out there than you realize, and they're not gonna be happy with this." I was met with a plausible reason, which was "We don't have enough time to develop a proper Deadpool suit and make him the fully realized version of the comic, so we're going with this." But I was like, "Then don't do it at all!"
You've been obsessed with Deadpool for forever. You were literally talking about it when you were doing press for Green Lantern.
It's like when your husband or wife is out there doing interviews and constantly batting their eyes about some other actor or actress—like, that's a problem. Right before I took Green Lantern, I wrote a letter to my executive at Fox saying, "I'm gonna take this movie Green Lantern if you guys aren't gonna make Deadpool. I'm at the altar, about to say 'I do' to somebody else, but tell me you want to spend the rest of your life with me, because I want to spend the rest of my life with you." And they said, "Unfortunately, we can't green-light that movie, and I don't think it's gonna ever get green-lit." So I was like, *Okay, I'm gonna go move on with my life, then, I guess.
It must have been unbelievably gratifying when Deadpool was a hit. When did you know?
When the Thursday midnight numbers were so excessive that I just went, "Whoa." We made our production budget back on Friday. There's a certain vindication that comes with that, especially because the studio—granted, under different regimes—for years just kept telling us to go fuck ourselves sterile.
Is Fox shoving money at you now?
Are you insane? It's not like, "We really want to shoot this on $70 million," and they're like, "We insist: It's 150." That never happens, trust me. And the first time, it was almost like the more Fox took away from us, the stronger we got. There's two moments of the movie where I forget my ammo bag. That's not because Deadpool's forgetful. That's because we couldn't afford the guns that we were about to use in the scene.
It sounds relentless.
I felt like I was on some schooner in the middle of a white squall the whole time. It just never stopped. When it finally ended, I had a little bit of a nervous breakdown. I literally had the shakes. I went to go see a doctor because I felt like I was suffering from a neurological problem or something. And every doctor I saw said, "You have anxiety."
What were you so anxious about?
I say this with the caveat that I completely recognize the ridiculously fortunate position that I am in. But the attention is hard on your nervous system—that might be why I live out in the woods. And I was banging the loudest drum for Deadpool. I wasn't just trying to open it; I was trying to make a cultural phenomenon.
How weird to be courting attention you don't want.
Well, I'm courting attention for the film.
But you are the film.
It is genuinely like an alter ego I can turn on and off.
Speaking of alter-egos, watch Ryan Reynolds get roasted by his slightly bitter twin brother, Gordon.
Is using humor to deflect the same as your dad only telling you Nancy is dandy?
Comedy is a thick buttress that can get between intimacy and you. My father is one of the places I got it from. But I believe I'm self-aware enough not to bring that into my home.
Your voice is different right now than when you go on talk shows. When you're "on," you almost sound like Phil Hartman.
Oh, I loved Phil Hartman.
You just seem more comfortable being yourself than you have in the past.
I think that was a slightly fear-based reaction—I never wanted to reveal too much. Even now I'm a little nervous, because you're having a conversation with somebody, and you could say something that either (a) just exposes your utter explosive ignorance about any given subject or (b) could be misinterpreted. I used to just shut down, like, "Okay, only crack jokes and cover the subject at hand in a very kind of cursory way." But I've embraced the fact that I'm smart. I've embraced the fact that I'm an idiot. I've embraced the fact that I'm funny. If this were five, four, three years ago even, I wouldn't have been like, "Come on in to my home, meet the baby." It's all human life. Take it or leave it.
When did you know it was going to happen with Blake?
Probably after the sex. No, we were hanging out at this little restaurant in Tribeca that's open really late, and this song came on and I was just like, "Want to dance?" No one was in there, so it was just totally empty. And it was just one of those moments where halfway through the dance, it was like, "Oh, I think I just crossed a line." And then I walked her home. And, uh, you know, I don't really need to go into what happened after that.
Do you remember the song?
I do, but I'm not gonna say. You're shut out.
Chris Pratt said that he'll use lines he wrote years earlier, and that the best acting he does is pretending he's coming up with them in the moment.
Yes, exactly! I often will write out bullet points before a talk show. I don't care who you are, going on Letterman was always a pants-shitting experience. You never want to be that guy who's like, "I just gotta work this in somehow." Everything you write, you have to be just as willing to throw away. I don't do it for pillow talk with my wife, and sometimes I do just improvise. But yeah, it's a lot more manufactured than people think.
What are your favorite Ryan Reynolds movies?
Buried, Adventureland. The Voices, Mississippi Grind. I love Deadpool with my last beating heart. I like Van Wilder. If you watch that, I'm just wholesale robbing from Chevy Chase.
He has that same kind of detached quality that you sometimes do.
There's an empathetic arrogance that he has. Despite the fact that he's telling you "Do not like me" and he's writing lines for himself that are meant to impale your sense of good taste, you're attracted to him.
What's next?
We all sat around and wrote Deadpool 2 in here, actually. Rhett and Paul were staying in the two bedrooms right down there on and off for about four months. I have Life, which is also written by Rhett and Paul—the whole film takes place on the International Space Station, and they discover a form of extraterrestrial life. I'm friends with Jake Gyllenhaal, and this was our first working experience together. They literally manufactured the ISS on a soundstage in London. I showed an astronaut the inside on FaceTime, and he was like, "Oh, my God! That's amazing!"
Your life seems so good right now. Are you content, or are you like, "It's all downhill from here"?
The needle doesn't move as much as you think it does—I really think that people just come down the chute a certain way. There's this idea that when somebody's just a miserable son of a bitch and they win the lottery, they're ecstatic for like six months, but when you catch up to them a year down the line, they're still a pessimistic person. And when a super-happy optimist loses everything in life, they just sort of figure it out and go back to their baseline. My baseline's pretty good, I think, aside from a few pretty intense anxiety hiccups over my life. I wouldn't say I'm quantifiably happier now than I was when I lived in my shithole studio apartment on Wilcox in Hollywood. I'm also old enough to understand what's an illusion and what's real, and that it's foolish to try to think that I can control anything from here on out.
Very Zen.
Undercut the Zen part with the same fears that everyone else has. But I wasn't a miserable fuck before I did this for a living, and I would hope that I would never turn into one, because I'm lucky. That's a Man of the Year quote right there. Jesus Christ.
Anna Peele is GQ's Culture Editor.
This article originally appeared in the December 2016 issue of GQ with the title "Dude Finally Made It.
