Hollywood's hunk of the day, Ryan Reynolds, first got into acting because it sounded like a good way to get out of the house, he tells DONALD CLARKE
RYAN REYNOLDS is Canadian. For too long, artistes from above the 49th parallel have been expected to repress their national traits and conform to a Californian norm. But Reynolds is quietly (that's the operative word here) determined that nobody forget his origins. Fast becoming one of Hollywood's most vital leading men, Reynolds is in London to discuss his role in a bizarre superhero film entitled Green Lantern. All day young people have been telling him how good looking he is. For hour after hour he has had to politely avoid talking about his recently dissolved marriage to Scarlett Johansson. I suppose these things come naturally to folk raised in the shadow of the Hollywood sign.
“Yeah,” he says with a jittery smile. “That’s a bit more difficult if you’re Canadian. It doesn’t come naturally. I wouldn’t want to make comparisons with our friends south of the border. But we are maybe a little less prone to talk about ourselves.”
So he still sees himself as a Canadian?
“Sure. I still have a home in Vancouver. It’s only a two-hour flight from LA, remember. That’s a one-industry town. So, it’s good to get home.”
And there’s Irish blood in there, I assume,
“Yes. I’ve been to Dublin and Galway. My brother and I just toured around there for a while. We have relatives there, whom we completely avoided,” he says, laughing.
Reynolds had better get used to chatting about himself. Now 34, blessed with the sort of old-school looks that never go out of fashion, he has battered his way through poor sitcoms and questionable romantic comedies to become one of this era's hottest actors. Laid back, but still capable of simmering intensity, Reynolds won over sceptics with last year's high-concept thriller Buried. He was creepy in Adventureland.He did good work opposite Sandra Bullock in the popular comedy The Proposal. Now, he's the official face of a summer blockbuster.
“I’ll say this,” he says, “when I was starting in LA, I never wanted to be the leading man. I wanted to be the character actor. That is part of why I hit relatively late. I am 6ft 2in. I will never get to play the weird next-door neighbour. I fought that for a long time. Then I saw the gift you get by playing a leading man. Around 26 or 27 I began to fall in love with film, which was late considering I had already been working for half a decade.”
Three years ago, when he was still married to Johansson, Peoplemagazine named him the sexiest man alive. He retained his title in 2009 and 2010. Nobody would object to receiving such an honour. But the prize could hamper his ambitions to become a character actor. After all, you never see Paul Giamatti or Philip Seymour Hoffman cropping up on those polls.
“I was a little embarrassed by that,” he says. “But I realise that’s a valid part of the promotional machine. It’s not something you campaign for. But what else can you do other than say thanks?”
There's that Canadian understatement again. Ryan Rodney Reynolds was born and raised in the sedate suburbs of Vancouver. His father was a police officer and his mother worked in sales. He was not one of those kids who always dreamt of making it into the movies. As he tells it, the business found him. In his pre-teen years, he dabbled in comedy improvisation. But acting came up as a career option only when Nickelodeon arrived in town to cast a new teen soap named Hillside.
“I thought that sounded like a good way to get out of the house,” he says. “They slowly whittled us down and suddenly they shipped me off to Florida. It was one of the first times I’d been in the States. It was actually ideal. We’d film for three months there and then I’d come back to go to school. I managed a very normal life.”
Hillsideran for three years. When the show ended, Reynolds made his way to Los Angeles and become a comedian. He had his sights set on the Groundlings troupe, the LA-based company that spawned such talents as Kathy Griffin, Conan O'Brien, Jon Lovitz and Kristen Wiig.
“Yeah, I tried college for 45 minutes. I turned around and went to LA the day after that. I mean I was there literally for 45 minutes. Something didn’t feel right for me. Mind you, if I had a son who did that I’d kick his ass into oblivion.”
I wonder how his hard-working, Irish-American cop father warmed to the notion of Reynolds running away to join the circus. “He wasn’t okay about it at all,” he says, laughing. “It wasn’t even when I had success that they were okay about it. I had to have immense success. My mother was quite supportive, but my father really wasn’t convinced for quite a while.”
The first few years were difficult. He quickly realised you couldn’t just walk into the Groundlings and begin doing funny voices. There was a lengthy audition and training process. This was particularly tricky: being Canadian, Reynolds didn’t have a visa for casual work. If he succeeded at an audition, the production company would arrange the paperwork, but the usual fail-safe for actors of waiting tables or serving drinks wasn’t an option.
“Sorry, I’d love to tell you a story about moonlighting as a Chippendale, but, not being a citizen, I had to live off money I’d saved. It ended up being like reverse engineering. If I can get a job on a sitcom or something then I can do the Groundlings thing. Then I got this job on a sitcom and thought: ‘Hey, they’re paying me money. There’s a live audience. This is better than just hanging out.’ ”
So he became an actor.
It’s understandable that Reynolds feels a little uncomfortable at being categorised as “a leading man”: at any time, half-a-dozen good-looking actors will be jostling to become the Hollywood hunk of the day. One or two will secure that title. Very few will stay famous for a significant length of time.
To maintain their position, such ambitious actors have to accommodate the publicity machine. Reynolds inadvertently offered the supermarket tabloids a cornucopia of titbits by dating two famous women early in his career. He was with Alanis Morissette from 2002 until 2007, and some songs from the Canadian whinger's 2008 album Flavors of Entanglementappear to address the relationship. Then, in 2008, he married Scarlett Johansson. They rapidly became a sort of junior Brad and Angie. Wander through any perfumery and, although the relationship ended in 2009, the couple still stare at one another from posters for different brands.
At mention of the relationships, Reynolds good-naturedly declines to comment. He seems embarrassed by his understandable discretion. “No, no, no. It’s okay,” he says. “But I just don’t talk about it. To be honest, I would be as protective if my relationships weren’t in the public eye. I never think its necessary to talk about that stuff publicly. I make that exclusive for family or friends.”
Despite shouldering the enormous handicap of being fantastically good looking, Reynolds has elbowed his way into some challenging roles. He was excellent as a sleazy mid-western loser in the loose-limbed comedy Adventureland. He was better still in last year's Buried, a film about a man inexplicably imprisoned in a coffin. That fine film never moved above ground and never showed another character's face. It looked like hard work.
“What can I tell you? I was in a coffin,” he says, laughing. “There was always one side open. But even that side had glass on it. So you are nailed in there for the most part. There was no other way to do it.”
Reynolds says small eccentric films such as Buriedare not much of a risk because "if it doesn't work nobody will see it, and if it does work still nobody will see it." Green Lanternis a different business. Made for about $150 million (about €104 million), the picture concerns a bloke called Hal who comes across a magic ring that makes him all-powerful. It hopes to fill a hole in the calendar between X-Men: First Classand Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Reynolds suddenly finds himself the figurehead for a financial behemoth.
“Yeah, you do feel that to some degree,” he says. “Mostly I notice the reaction of kids. You start to meet kids who recognise you even before the movie has come out. I’ve never had a movie that my nieces and nephews were so excited about. Suddenly I am Uncle Hal rather than Uncle Ryan. That’s very different.” He seems unnerved by the attention that comes with being a superhero. How very Canadian.
10 CANADIAN MOVIE STARS
1 Mary Pickford
Once among the most famous women on the planet, the silent-movie star was born and raised in Toronto, where a bust can be found in her birthplace. now a children's hospital.
2 Donald Sutherland
Raised in the relatively remote city of Saint John, New Brunswick, the charismatic, star of
M*A*S*Hand
Don't Look Nowlater trained at the London Academy of Musical and Dramatic Arts. His son, Kiefer, also deserves mention.
3 William Shatner
Shatner, who recently celebrated his 80th birthday, deserves the title "living legend". The Students' Society building at McGill University, his alma mater, is unofficially referred to as Shatner.
4 Jim Carrey
"If my career in show business hadn't panned out I would probably be working today in Hamilton, Ontario, at the Dofasco steel mill." The steel industry's loss is broad, gurning comedy's gain.
5 Michael J Fox
Fox who contracted Parkinson's Disease some years ago and is now 50 years old, was raised in the city of Edmonton, Alberta. He was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada for his charity work.
6 Christopher Plummer
Born in Toronto in 1929, Plummer has a slippery vocal persona. He could easily be taken for an Englishman or a US citizen. Lest there be any doubt, he is also an officer of the Order of Canada.
7. Leslie Nielsen
One of the few actors whose name alone raises a smile, Nielsen passed away last year at the age of 84. The good people of Regina, Saskatchewan, his hometown, mourned with particular vigour.
8 Keanu Reeves
The archetypal Californian surfer dude was actually born in, erm, Beirut. That can't be right. Following a peripatetic early
life, he and his family eventually settled in Toronto, and he still calls himself Canadian.
9 Dan Aykroyd
Space prohibits inclusion of funny men such as Phil Hartman, Eugene Levy and the great John Candy. Aykroyd, an Ottawa man, stands in for them all.
10 Mike Myers
Though recent catastrophes have tarnished his reputation, we should remember that, during the 1990s and early 2000s, Myers was among the biggest stars on the planet. He's from Scarborough, Ontario.
