Ryan Reynolds is an actor in transition. After filling pastries with canine semen in Van Wilder and serving as vampire-hunting eye candy in Blade: Trinity, Reynolds now appears intent on going the "serious actor" route, seeking out only those projects that serve to broaden his artistic horizons.
Case in point is Reynold's latest movie, The Nines. The directorial debut from longtime movie scribe John August (Big Fish, Charlie's Angels, Shazam!), The Nines is a cerebral, three-part tale of intertwining lives and parallel universes. Last week, Reynolds sat down with ReelzChannel.com to talk about his new career path.
How did you come to the project? Did John approach you directly? Had you read the script?
Well, I have a team of interpretive dancers that acted it out for me. No, I read the script immediately as soon as it came to me. It was something that my agent I guess was very, very excited about so I read it right away and fell in love with it and tried to get a meeting with John as soon as I could and we had lunch and I think half of the casting process these days is a matter of finding somebody as excited about a project as you are so, I think John could see my enthusiasm and how into this thing I was and I think he felt maybe I had a similar idea as to what it was all about. We had similar notions on it. The next thing I knew I was shooting a movie.
He said the main reason you got cast was the physical resemblance. (Note: John August looks nothing like Ryan Reynolds.)
Oh, between he and I? Yes, of course. It’s like looking in a mirror often. In fact, I’m John. He’s over there doing the other interview. Yeah, John became a really fast friend as well which is I think no coincidence to me getting cast. I mean, we really just hit it off right off the bat. He’s a good guy. Even when we’re doing these press days they can be a little stressful particularly when you’re as jet lagged as I am. I just got back from Europe last night in the middle of the night. You know I see his face and go oh good everything’s all right. I’ve got my buddy here—a comrade. So, he’s an excellent human being.
Your agent was excited about this movie? It seems like such a small, risky project.
Yeah, definitely. I think for him it’s a calculated risk. I mean it’s a movie that deals with subject matter that I think is exciting to him and anyone else who would have read it. I mean, anytime you can find something that you can get behind that unorthodox and hasn’t really been seen before but you’re still really able to stretch yourself and dive into wholeheartedly I think that’s kind of unusual these days. So many projects you read are cast up already or it’s really is difficult…good problems to have, but it’s difficult to find a script and a director in particular that can really pull something really fantastic off. I particularly believe that actors are as good as their director and it’s their medium. Theatre might be our medium but this one’s theirs through and through.
When you take on a project like this, are you thinking, "Well, it may not be a box office success but it could be a good calling card role for future projects?
Yeah, I don’t have a lot of like $150 million box office gross movies in my wake so it’s not like it’s the first thing I think about. I also don’t think that’s anyway to survive in this industry. There are certainly guys out there that are those 20/20 guys, you know. $20 million 20% gross guys that like have a way of a science to this thing that they’re in and I ever really think that way, I just love the material and it was something I felt that I could do something with. It was one of those really tough movies because it’s three distinct characters and to find a way to do three distinct characters that doesn’t feel really indulgent was the trick. In fact, it wasn’t finding the differences in the characters that was hard it was finding the similarities that I was looking for. I felt like not to be so esoteric about it but this is a story about the puppet and the puppeteer being one in the same.
Your films are almost always different from each other and it’s hard to categorize you. What attracts you to a project?
You know, it’s always a tough question. I don’t know. I mean, usually if it’s something that I feel is challenging I feel like it’s very difficult to choose movies way in advance because if I shoot one—sometimes I have the good fortune to have two movies lined up in a row and I’ll inevitably drop out of the second one because once you finish the first one everything’s different. You have different ideas of where you want to go next or what you want to do and as soon as you realize you’re kind of pegged into this thing you have to do in a month from now, I sort of blister a little bit and so yeah, as far as choosing roles go it’s just hard to find the stuff that presents something different or is a challenge. I like doing the mainstream, right down the pike broad comedies as much as I like doing the kind of unorthodox different stuff.
How did you approach playing a character based on your director, John August?
With kid gloves. [laughs] John, yeah, I think that’s more of a challenge for him than it is for me because I’m not portraying him in the sweetest light. I mean, you’ve met him and he’s an excellent human being but he’s really showing his ambition and his hubris in that piece. I’d have a really tough time watching that if that were me being played on the screen. I had a tough time doing it because usually I always find that the most rewarding things in life are somewhat kind of counter-intuitive and what was counter-intuitive about that to me was that I was presenting myself as John but presenting myself in a way that is not appealing and not like pre-packaged to make people think I’m this guy or like this really funny charismatic charming fellow or somebody that is likeable. It was this really kind of ugly side to this person and doing it felt disgusting then walking away you kind of look at the movie now and that’s my favorite part. I love that section. I mean that’s the warts and all section and that’s what it’s all about. I loved it but it was definitely strange, you know, capturing John’s little things that John does.
What about playing the actor?
Anyone with access to outside information knows that you can’t even get into any acting union without smoking crack, crashing your car, wearing an ankle bracelet. Yeah, it is a little strange playing an actor, but that character Gary’s a bit—he walks that line between kind of vacuous and emotional and there’s a lot of actors out there like that. There’s a lot of actors I think that appear so much more together as the characters they portray as opposed to the actual people, so I know I’ve said this before Hollywood’s not a place where you’re rewarded for growing up. You’re in fact rewarded for f*cking up and you know that can cause a strain. That can cause a strange dynamic. This arrested development that you see in so many young celebrities, you know crashing cars and doing whatever the hell they’re doing. But yeah, it was fun in a weird round-about way of poking fun at Hollywood, how like emotionally irresponsible so many people can be and in Gary’s case physically as well. Yeah, it was fun definitely. I was into that one. All three of them I love. They’re all aspects of myself as well. You can’t jump into a role unless you’re finding things that mirror your own condition.
You’ve done a good job of staying out of that. How did you manage that?
You know I think in some degree you can court that. If you court it, it’s going to find you, but yeah, to some degree you can’t completely control it. There’s a very real possibility in this industry of going out and leading your life and then going home and being a voyeur of your own life. You can literally go watch yourself—where you went last night, what you did, what the things that people presuppose about you. It’s kind of crazy. That stuff is a real turnoff for me so I don’t really…I don’t know. I don’t have an answer to why I don’t have all that going on, I don’t really go out. Maybe that’s just sad.
You got buff for your role in Blade: Trinity, but you never really followed that up with more action roles. Why?
Well, I mean I can’t do the movies where I’m just intermittingly clenching my jaw muscles and shooting people. There’s got to be something… if it’s funny, then that’s kind of cool or if it’s very real and it taps into something for me that’s great too but I don’t think I want to go see those movies let alone be in them. Yeah, like I said it’s just finding those.
You have a few projects coming up later this year. Can you talk about your upcoming movies?
I have a movie called Definitely, Maybe, which has a great cast. It’s got Kevin Kline and Rachel Weisz and Abigail Breslin and Isla Fisher, Derek Luke. It’s just a big cast and that is about I kind of liken that to a love letter to broken families. It’s about a guy who’s explaining his impending divorce to his daughter and she asks how I met her mom. I say come on what do you think I’m going to tell you to story of how I met mom and I’m going to fall back in love with her. It doesn’t work that way, I’m sorry. And she says I need to know. I say ok, I’ll tell you what. I had three great loves in my life. I’m going to tell you the story of these three great loves but I’m going the change all the names and you have to guess which one is your mom. So we go all the way back to ’92, that’s when the story begins and it goes to 2008 and it’s sort of really sweet, sort of comedy but more romance and several romantic who-done-it kind of thing. Then I have another movie called Fireflies in the Garden which I love. It’s a story about a family broken apart by the death of the matriarch—her mother who’s played by Julia Roberts. That kind of echoes some stuff with my own childhood and growing up. I mean, who doesn’t have a f*cked up family. So, I think that’s probably a little bit more broadly appealing than I like to believe but I’m really excited about that one as well. Then I have this little thing called The Nines.
Were there any aspects of your role in The Nines that made you nervous?
No, the biggest thing for me was being really careful about part two. Just John and when I started I baby stepped it and checked it out and he’s ok if I’m going this far with it and he was not just ok, he was very happy with it. It was really liberating but it was the one I’d given the least amount of thought to as well because I was so overwhelmed. It was the last one we were shooting, the last piece and it was like one of those nightmares that I just kept putting in the back of my mind like I have no idea how I’m going to do this. There’s very little script for it. It’s all kind of improvised reality television kind of feel so it really speaks…you try different processes every time I do a movie. The research is insane. It’s so overkill. I have no life beforehand and I don’t think you see it on the screen as much as I would like to believe. Like I’d feel like sometimes you can just shoot from the hip and it’s great. There’s something to be said about just surrendering to something instead of just trying to shape it into something. I really learned a lot doing that one. I just really just dove in and I let go and I surrendered and just let myself be it as opposed to trying to figure it out, have some sort of logical equation as to how to play John, you know, just listen to him and do it.
Why do you think your character feels such an attraction to Melissa McCarthy's character?
I always felt like my character’s creating all these realities and one of the reasons he’s doing it is to be near her. I feel like there’s a …one of the things I found so charming about his story is that in a sense it’s a love story but a person that doesn’t see love the same way everyone else does. Doesn’t see love in the romantic sense necessarily, he just sees it as like something more mercurial and that’s something I loved about it. My character even says in the movie in many incarnations you are my sister, my friend, my mother, my wife, my lover, my girlfriend whatever he was always near her and I love that. It’s something that still makes the hairs stand on end on my face. So yeah, I think Melissa is an outstanding person and perfect for the role as well.
How do you describe this film to your friends who haven’t seen it?
God, I don’t. I don’t. I say it’s a charming story about a boy and his dog. I don’t know what to tell them. It’s really a difficult movie to log line. Most people want to kind of grab onto like what they think is a hook which is oh, you play three different people in one movie and it’s not really a hook it’s actually part of the story. It’s not done in this indulgent vain kind of way. So most people kind of grab onto that. My parents are like, "Oh, that’s the one where you play three different people. Oh, I can’t wait to see that." My mother’s Marge Simpson. [laughs] It’s a difficult thing to explain, I usually say it’s three separate stories that interlock in mysterious ways.
It also becomes a musical when Hope Davis starts singing.
It is. It has a little bit of that as well. It was definitely strange. I can’t say that I fully understood what was happening in that moment, but when you see it you do but at least I do but yeah, it was definitely odd though. It was a great song, though.
Are you the type of person who can enjoy watching yourself on-screen when you’re at a premiere. or do you just bail out the minute it starts?
I f*ckin’ hate it. It’s so hard to watch myself. If I can get away from it long enough, I’m ok. I just watched The Nines again when I was away and I hadn’t seen it in a long time and it was actually great to watch it because I watched it with a few other people and I kind of saw it how they saw it. It was great. I really fell in love with it. I was like oh, great. If I can get away from myself enough, if I’m far enough away from it that I forget what the options were in that particular scene—wasn’t it done angrily at one point or wasn’t there…I sort of do this Rubic's Cube process in my mind and it’s really frustrating. If I can get away from it and forget it and then see it again, I can relate to it. It’s an honest test, sometimes I’ve seen…I have other movies that I’ve been away from a long time and not liked and that’s usually the biggest indicator of whether I like it or not. It’s just enough time between it.
Have you explored any television opportunities?
No, TV’s great but I just feel like the mediums I would have most fun in be it like a live audience type stuff would probably be the thing I’d have most fun in. I think that medium is a little bit corpse-like at the moment, so probably not. If I don’t have to I wouldn’t. Yeah, why would you want to play the same character for six years unless it kept evolving? Who knows? Never say never.
The Nines opens in select theaters this Friday, August 31st.