meanandproud | Ryan Reynolds: Alpha Magazine November 2013

Ryan Reynolds covers our November issue. Out on the stands tomorrow. Remember this one has a 40-page Watch Special!
source: facebook.com/alphamagazine, alphamagazine.ae

You’re more likely to have heard Ryan Reynolds over the past couple of years than seen him. A couple of stints on Seth MacFarlane’s hit animated comedy Family Guy were followed by voice roles in The Croods and Turbo. Prompting us to ask: What’s the point of being a former People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive if you’re always hidden behind a cartoon garden snail?

But fast-forward to 2014 and Reynolds is going to be as inescapable as a straitjacket. In The Captive, directed by fellow Canadian Atom Egoyan, he plays a father trying to track down his kidnapped daughter (see, Liam Neeson doesn’t have a monopoly on all those roles after all).

Then he reverts to starring in a brace of the kind of wacky light comedies in which he excels: first appearing opposite Gemma Arterton as a disturbed factory worker who hears animals’ inner thoughts in The Voices, then as man whose body is inhabited by a dying wealthy pensioner in Selfless.

Away from the camera he’s also been busy promoting Hugo Boss’ new fragrance range, Boss Bottled. He spoke to us while representing the brand in Barcelona and told us about staying in shape for action roles, breaking bones when performing stunts and learning life lessons from RIPD co-star Jeff Bridges.

Your last few roles have been quite varied. Light comedy in 2011’s The Change-up, then Safehouse, an action movie, followed by voice roles in hit animations The Croods and Turbo... Do you purposely try to mix things up in this way?

Some of it’s calculated and some of it is just happenstance. Some of the best projects that I’ve ever had the fortune to work on happen through a chance meeting or by accident, while other ones have been ones I’ve chased down or worked really hard to acquire. So it can happen any number of ways. I just feel lucky that I’ve been able to work in a number of genres in my career.

Tell us about the voice roles. Do you just turn up, read the lines and pick up the cheque?

I wish I could give you some kind of sob story about how difficult it is, but honestly, voice-over stuff is frighteningly lethargic. You really don’t have to do too much. You get a call, and they say we’re picking you up tomorrow, and you go to the studio for a couple of hours and then you leave. And when you’re there it’s just playtime. There isn’t a tremendous amount of brow-beating over the script. It’s usually a whole lot of fun for everyone.

What was it like working with Jeff Bridges on RIPD?

Working with Jeff, you don’t really learn so much about acting as how to be a better person. He is one of those rare individuals who is as kind and generous as he is talented and that shines through in everything he does. He has a kind of Zen-Buddhist mentality about his life – he’s even written a book about it [The Dude and the Zen Master] – but really… you can’t say enough good things about Jeff. He’s a gentleman and a class act. Most people aren’t lucky enough to have an insight into what he’s like as a person, so I felt fortunate to have that experience with him.

I watched Safehouse recently and it’s a pretty brutal role. The Captive sounds like it might be equally bruising. Do you enjoy the physical aspect of being an actor – doing the stunts and all the running around?

I do, but at 37-years-old I’m finding that falling down on cement isn’t quite as hilarious as it used to be. So I’m trying to cut back a little bit. I notice that I’m getting more and more MRI scans these days and I’m breaking all sorts of stuff. The last two movies have taken their toll. When shooting Safehouse I got a neck injury shooting a stunt. I got an X-ray six or seven months later and found that six vertebrae were broken.

How hard is it to stay in good physical shape for these parts?

I think that health is like your career. I work out to be ready and I’m lucky that I’m tall and naturally lean, but I work hard so that I can do films like Safehouse and walk away from them without using crutches. It’s not hyperbole when I say they are incredibly physical roles. Action movies like that are typically shot with handheld cameras and there are lots of close-ups so you can’t always use stuntmen. There’s nothing worse than sitting in a theatre and watching an actor do a stunt poorly. And the by-product of all the training is that you look good and you feel good in your clothes.

There are lots of Brits and Canadians getting top movie and TV roles in the US at the moment. You and Ryan Gosling from Canada, a lot of English actors filling superhero roles, and so on. Are the American actors scared of the invasion?

Well, I hope so! [Laughs] I don’t know why that is. There are certainly a huge amount of talented American actors and actresses who I think get the lion’s share of work, but there is a proportional amount of men and women from the Commonwealth countries who are coming in and doing a great job.

Why do you think Green Lantern failed to live up to expectations?

It’s a difficult thing to talk about in the sense that, no, the movie didn’t fulfil the expectation that the audience had, and it didn’t fulfil the expectation that I had. But at the same time you have to balance that with the notion that there are 250 men and women who worked immensely hard on that film and they don’t have a voice to discuss it in such a wide forum as I do now. I would never want to do them a disservice at all, but no, the movie did not fulfil public expectation and at this stage we can acknowledge that. But you have to remember that movies are a very fickle, mercurial industry and that’s the way things are sometimes.

You’ve been acting since childhood, but was there ever a stage where you doubted that this was what you wanted to do with your life?

Yeah, I think that happens every couple of cycles of the moon! When you stop dreaming about other options for yourself as a person you can atrophy. I think I was lucky that I was never enormously successful as a child actor. I wasn’t part of the zeitgeist the way that, say, Justin Bieber is today. I wasn’t in the limelight. And when they make mistakes people are pretty unforgiving about it. I would have to say with ease that I made all the same mistakes, if not more, but got away with them because the entire world wasn’t watching. Maybe that helped me have less doubt.

You’re obviously travelling a lot with Hugo Boss right now and seeing the world, but what’s been the highlight of your experience as the brand’s ambassador so far?

Certainly the travel is great. I mean, I’m talking to you from one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Barcelona. But the highlight for me has been the ease of the pairing. We’ve never been at odds and that’s something rare in this day and age. You see a lot of celebrities endorsing many different things and aligning themselves with different companies and there are some horror stories but this has been a really harmonious pairing. It’s nice working with a company that I truly love and that makes my job easier.