Yes, believe it or not, Van Wilder is a father now. And if you think getting married, living in the suburbs, and making responsible career decisions have softened him up, you haven’t watched that incredible trailer for Deadpool. (Also, lest we forget, he shares that home in the burbs with cool mom Blake Lively.) So join us in getting fired up for Ryan Reynolds’s next act
The first thing Ryan Reynolds would like you to know about having kids is: Don’t listen to what Ryan Reynolds thinks about having kids. “Picture advice being loaded into Super Soakers,” he says, grinning. He looks me up and down—I’m 33, about to be married, on the brink of it. “You’re running around all dry and fancy-free—you’re gonna be, like, drenched,” he warns me. “The one piece of advice I would say is: Don’t listen to any advice. Because there’s nothing you can do to prepare for it.”
Reynolds is 38 and on his eight or ninth Hollywood lifetime—he’s been the cult-comedy guy from Van Wilder and the romantic-comedy guy from The Proposal and the guy in a CGI suit talking to a tennis ball in Green Lantern. He’s been the next big thing more times than he can count. But right now his life can be summed up in far more elemental terms. There’s the rustic house about an hour of north of New York City, where he and his wife, Blake Lively, have chosen to live and raise their daughter, James. And then there’s the baby-monitor app on his iPhone, which buzzes every couple seconds as we sit upstairs in the renovated barn next to the main house. “This is your future right here,” he says, showing me the cascade of alerts on his phone. James is 8 months old and about a hundred feet away, with her mother. And that’s what’s become of Ryan Reynolds.
“I’ve learned that an inordinate amount of clichés are completely true,” he says. “Like, there is this kid here that I would walk through fire for. Or maybe not fire. Like, a very hot pavement, I’d walk through. A shag rug.”
Are you the father you hoped you’d be?
“I think I am, yeah. I can’t say I had an easy relationship with my father, and I can’t say my brothers did either, but I look at each of my older brothers, and they’re all fathers, and they’re all great fathers. So I had some good examples. But I don’t think you really necessarily need examples. You just try to not be a complete pile of shit and just be there for them. You know, I like it: I mean that in the heaviest context. I genuinely like it. I like being a father. I like having a daughter. I would like to have more kids. You know, it seems to suit me pretty well.”
“I’m surprised how patient I am with it. I feel like I could sometimes have a bit of a short fuse, but there’s just been this weirdly endless supply of patience. I have no problem waking up five times in the middle of the night and changing diapers, and as exhausted as you get, I have this stupid grin on my face all the time. And that’s not because I have a nanny or something like that. It’s just us right now, and I love it.”
You were talking about having complicated feelings about the way you were raised. Does having a kid change that?
“Yeah, in a lot of different ways that I think are cool. One is that you become a lot more forgiving. Once you have a kid, you just think, like, ‘I can’t believe that another person did all this shit for me, that I’m doing for this person right now!’ Like, that somebody woke up in the middle of the night this many times just to wipe my ass. It’s just profound to me. So you start to have a great deal more respect for your own parents. Not that I didn’t already. But I don’t know how my parents did it with four kids. Four boys! Who basically did everything short of setting their own home on fire every single day of their lives. It’s gotta be pretty intense.”
What have you learned about yourself from the experience so far?
“There are a million clichés that are just true. I get why parents have that sort of predisposition to talk about their child as if they’re the only people that have ever copulated and pumped out a kid. I understand that. I don’t fucking fall victim to it, because, especially celebrities, when they talk about their kid, they talk about their kid like they’re the Chosen One, or they’re the only people who have ever had a child.”
“Let me tell you about this thing called childbirth.”
“Oh, man. Honestly, I’ve really seen that line. I find it to be really obnoxious. In fact, every time I talk about my kid in public, I’m generally talking about how average she is. But at home, I’m like, ‘You’re a genius! Oh, my God! You just took a shit in your diaper that came out as a perfect musical note!’ ”
Do you miss your old life? You can’t just take a spontaneous trip anymore.
“I didn’t miss it until you fucking said it like that, no.”
“Let me tell you about this thing called childbirth.”
“Oh, man. Honestly, I’ve really seen that line. I find it to be really obnoxious. In fact, every time I talk about my kid in public, I’m generally talking about how average she is. But at home, I’m like, ‘You’re a genius! Oh, my God! You just took a shit in your diaper that came out as a perfect musical note!’ ”
Do you miss your old life? You can’t just take a spontaneous trip anymore.
“I didn’t miss it until you fucking said it like that, no.”
This spring, Lively posted an Instagram photo of Reynolds carrying James in a baby carrier, and apparently James’s feet were together when they should’ve been separated or something, who knows really, and the couple found themselves being harangued by millions of mommy bloggers. “Please read your baby product manuals with as much detail as you read a script”—someone really left that comment on Lively’s Instagram. Matt Lauer even grilled Reynolds about the incident on The Today Show.
And it’s funny, because you can tell you’re answering through gritted teeth.
“Yeah, ‘Can I just make some mistakes and all of you just fuck off?’ Yeah. You want to be able to say that. But you can’t say that. There is almost no community on Earth as intense as the parent-child online community.”
It was as if the existence of a child spawned by Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively drove people around them crazy, like actually crazy, and there was a two-week stretch near the beginning when Reynolds wondered if it was always going to be like this.
First he got hit by a car. It was April, a few months after his kid was born, and he was in Vancouver, shooting Deadpool. “I was in an underground parking garage that…The guy has yet to appear in court, so I don’t even know if I can talk about it. But, yeah, I was hit by a car.” That was drama enough—a paparazzo striking Ryan Reynolds with his car. (He was fine.)
But that wasn’t the worst part. “A guy that I’d known for my whole life, one of my closest friends growing up, he had been shopping pictures of my baby around. I kind of got in front of it, which is good. But it was a slightly dark period. A bad couple of weeks.”
This was somebody you knew well?
“Somebody I grew up with, yeah. Somebody I’ve known, who’s been one of my closest friends, for 25 years.”
Was that an experience you’d had before, being betrayed by someone like that?
“No. It was like a death. It was like one of those devastating things to find out.”
Did you have a conversation about it?
“Yeah. Yeah. It was a pretty strongly worded conversation.”
Courtesy : GQ
