Ryan Reynolds: Im terrified Im genetically predisposed to only having boys
Here’s something I will never understand: if you’re a magazine editor and you get a somewhat major actor to pose for a real photoshoot for your magazine, why would you go out of your way to make it look like A) you hate the actor and/or B) that you’re cutting and pasting his image from some other source? I don’t know what to make of Details’ August cover featuring Ryan Reynolds. It’s awful. And the rest of the shoot is pretty boring too. I wasn’t expecting much from the interview, so I was slightly surprised when Ryan did talk a little bit about married life with Blake and some interesting stuff about his family and career. You can read the full piece here, and here are some highlights:
He’s the youngest of four brothers, his dad was a cop: He was born in Vancouver to a working mom and a cop-turned-food-wholesaler father. “My brothers and I, we all look and move and sound so different, you’d never guess we exited the same vagina,” he says. “I pretty much got pounded the whole time. I don’t bruise easily anymore. I can’t tell you how many times the cops were called to our house.” But wait. . . wasn’t your dad a police officer then? “Yeah, that’s very embarrassing. When your dad’s a cop, calling 911 is really just like calling Dad at work.”
Early acting gigs: “I’d fantasize that I had tuberculosis,” he says. “It was just totally weird. I’d believe it, too. I told everybody I was dying from TB. To this day I can’t really explain it, other than it was just an obvious prelude to what I do now, living in make-believe in this hyperdramatized environment.”
He shades Green Lantern: “Every time I’ve gotten myself into trouble it’s because I’m choosing a project based on a long-term career goal as opposed to something that speaks to me at the moment,” he admits, citing Green Lantern. “When I signed on, there was no script. There was just some art to look at. It was a time when I thought, ‘Wow, I sort of have to do this.’ I felt I had to go forward even though I knew nothing about it.”
Trying not to discuss his personal life: “I don’t intentionally try to be evasive about that stuff,” he explains. “If you ask me to describe my relationship, I mean—words are too clumsy to accurately describe how I feel in that regard, particularly in an interview. It’s a strange thing. I understand the climate we live in and why people are curious. But it’s just tough and almost emotionally violent—for anyone, I think—to see your personal life summarized in a sentence.”
He wants to be a dad: “We’d love to have a big family,” he says. “We both come from big families—my parents did four, Blake’s did five. A lot of people say it’s crazy, but we’ll only know when we’re there, you know? We’ll walk through that fire pretty happily, I think. I think you have to let go of this idea that you can be precious about everything, and let it be the abstract mess that it is,” he says of the child-crammed life he’s envisioning, which, unlike his own family, he hopes will include some daughters. “I’m terrified that I’m genetically predisposed to only having boys. That’s frightening. By the time I was 10 years old, and I’m not exaggerating, I knew how to patch drywall. There’s nothing my brothers and I didn’t put a hole in. We turned our home into a Wiffle house. That’s something I’m not looking forward to.”
Moving beyond his comfort zone in his career: “There’s s–t-your-pants fear around every corner because I’m usually stepping out of a comfort zone that I haven’t done before in a film,” Reynolds says of his current projects. “But that’s the wonder of it, the beauty of it. I can’t say I’ve ever finished a film and been particularly thrilled with myself or patted myself on the back. And maybe that’s what keeps me going, and that’s a good thing. It speaks volumes about how I perceive myself. Like a lot of people, I’ve got a self-loathing streak that’s alive and well. It acts as a de facto engine when I’m working, but it also has its extraordinary pitfalls, too.”
He mentions Blake again: “I told Blake I was going to do this entire interview just singing ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ and see if you would print that verbatim,” he says. “Just hours of that.”
I’ll admit that I laughed out loud at “I’m terrified that I’m genetically predisposed to only having boys. That’s frightening. By the time I was 10 years old, and I’m not exaggerating, I knew how to patch drywall. There’s nothing my brothers and I didn’t put a hole in.” I just got an image of a ten-year-old patching drywall and it was really funny. Ryan’s poor mom! All those destructive boys. As for Ryan’s baby-longing… the tabloids keep claiming that Blake did a bait-and-switch on the baby issue, that she was all “I would love to have babies!” when they were dating and now that she’s got the ring, she’s not really into it. It will be interesting to see if and when Blake gets knocked up. We’ll see, y’all.
Photos courtesy of Details.
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