INTERVIEW:He's married to one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, and his own star is rising just as fast, but Ryan Reynolds is eager to keep his private life private, as FIONA MCCANNdiscovers
HE HAS JUST got married to one of Hollywood’s hottest stars – Scarlett Johansson, if you must know – and as coincidence would have it, his latest film is about a marriage proposal. So why is Ryan Reynolds so cagey about how he popped the question himself? “I don’t think I’m prepared to give away my technique,” he tells a group of assembled journalists in a London hotel, and is quick to deflect with a one-liner that has them all in titters: “All I can say is there was a ninja and a firetruck involved, and a great deal of coercion.”
At the press conference to publicise the film, aptly called The Proposal, he's all punchlines and repartee, buzzing off co-star Sandra Bullock and entertaining the fourth estate with witty self-deprecation and references to his see-through cellophane speedos (worn for a scene in the nip rather than a personal sartorial choice). Yet one-on-one, when it's just me and Ryan Reynolds in a small hotel room, the quick-fire funny man disappears, replaced with a candid, handsome and cannily evasive leading man who gives less away in our short conversation than his publicists did in the biography of the actor they e-mailed me beforehand.
In his newest film, a rom-com-by-numbers rescued by the charm and timing of its two leading actors, Reynolds’s character Andrew agrees to marry his she-devil boss Margaret, played by Bullock, to avoid her deportation back to Canada, which is ironically Reynolds’s own birthplace. Anxious to pass themselves off as a genuine couple, in one particular scene they are forced to fabricate a “story” about the marriage proposal, though ninjas and firetrucks don’t feature. Yet Reynolds is still keeping his own story close to his chest. “If I tell my proposal story it’s going to be,” he pauses, searching for the right simile . . . “It’s basically a lot like how you lose generations when you record something. Eventually it’s going to find its way to a really trivial nature, and I don’t want that to happen.”
Reynolds’s caginess is understandable, particularly given the high profile of his new wife, and the fact that his engagement to her was, in fact, this 32-year-old’s second. Just five years ago, he was set to marry Canadian singer Alanis Morissette. But the couple announced their split in 2007, and soon afterwards Reynolds and Johansson were revealed as an item. They were married last year, but despite repeated proddings on his nuptials, Reynolds politely refuses to enter into the intricacies of his private life.
“The trick for me is that there’s a fundamental difference between secrecy and privacy. You don’t want to be secret, you want to be private,” he says. “I’m not in the reality television business, I’m not here to tell everybody the intimate details about my life. I’m here to be in films and stay as long as they’ll have me so I don’t think it’s really necessary to be on Twitter or to be . . . talking about the hue of the pants that I’m wearing right now, or my religious preferences, or my latest baby picture. I just don’t feel like it’s necessary. It’s not part of the bargain.”
Instead, he is eager to talk about his latest romantic comedy with Bullock, with whom he has been friends for years. “What attracted me to was the role reversal,” says Reynolds, who plays Bullock’s much-put-upon assistant in the film. “I got to be the leading lady and Sandra got to be the leading man.”
Not quite. Reynolds gives as good as he gets in the film, and makes a point of putting his former boss in her place in order to seal the deal and – apologies for the spoiler, here – plant the long-awaited kiss in the end. It’s hardly a feminist flick, then, and never strays too far from the formula, but Reynolds isn’t worried about becoming a Hollywood cliche. “To me, these movies definitely have a footprint that you need to adhere to, to a certain degree, but it’s the journey, it’s how you get there, and it’s how well that’s executed that makes it unique and interesting,” he says. “It’s all about chemistry . . . It’s just about those fireworks between Sandra and me and if those work everything else does.”
The chemistry, despite an age gap that director Anne Fletcher gracefully underplays, does work, though perhaps more crucially, so does the comedy. “It’s so hard to find a movie that is in this genre that’s actually laugh-out-loud funny,” says Reynolds, who cut his teeth in comedy improvisation, setting up his own improv group Yellow Snow when he was still in high school. “I felt like this had a great deal of opportunity to be hilarious, and if they found the right girl to play Margaret Tate, it could be unstoppable. And then my friend jumped in there, and the next thing you know we’re here.”
He is in the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Knightsbridge to promote a film that has already been a box-office hit in the US, grossing more than $120 million (€84 million) to date, and which looks set to catapult Reynolds to the A-list of bankable stars. Yet given the success of the vehicle that got him there, is he worried about being typecast as the Tom Hanks of the 21st century? “Two things. First off, if you’re typecast into only doing romantic comedies, that’s a really high-class problem. Secondly, if you are, you are the architect of that problem, you really are. You can always not do that and try to do something else. It may not pay as much but you just go a different way. It’s up to you.”
Reynolds has clearly made that decision, given that his next release is an indie film, Buried, where he plays a civilian contractor in Iraq who is kidnapped and buried alive. “ a movie that has the budget of the catering bill on The Proposal,” he admits, but he has no regrets about taking a pay cut in this instance. “I’m so glad I have that choice. Some people don’t. It’s harder for other actors to just jump in on something else, so yeah, I’m going to take it every time.”
This from a man who purports to have fallen into the business, having worked in a series of odd jobs in his home town of Vancouver and even enrolling in college there before making a permanent switch to acting. “Honestly, it just started off as a bloody living,” he says with a smile. “I just thought, ‘Oh wow, this is a job on camera that seems to pay some pretty good money. Okay, I’ll do this.’ And it evolved from there.”
It’s refreshing to hear him admit that he didn’t show particular promise in his younger years, having failed in drama in secondary school at the age of 12. Though he blames the black mark on poor attendance, his attitude towards his chosen profession has undergone some transformation in the intervening two decades. “It was a few years ago that I kind of fell in love with it.”
Acting, he admits, has finally become a passion, though it hasn’t prevented him from becoming involved in all sorts of extracurricular activities on top of embarking on a new married life. Last year, he ran the New York City Marathon to raise money for Parkinson’s disease, from which his father suffers. To raise awareness about the illness, he wrote a piece for the Huffington Post on the subject. It’s one of a number of articles with his byline that has appeared on the site, but he assures me he has no plans to switch careers. “I don’t want to cramp your style or anyone else’s. is a nice place to go to every once in a while, if you want to voice something or just have some fun or poke fun at something. I usually try to hybridise the two but no, I don’t think I have any kind of future in journalism.”
For now, he’s sticking to cinema, and no wonder: the continued success of The Proposal is fast converting him into box-office gold. During the press conference, he jokes about how his marriage has resolved any question over his own deportation from the US as a Canadian citizen. “I remedied that, didn’t I?” His answers to the crowd of journalists collected are all comedy. But get him in private and the romance in Reynolds is slowly revealed, as the new young husband lets slip a little about love. “If you meet that person that you’re meant to be with, that’s who you’re meant to be with and that’s what’s going to happen,” he says, and it’s clear that this US-based Canadian has found where he belongs. “And that becomes home.”
The Proposalis on general release nationwide