DETAILS Cover Story: Ryan Reynolds Gets His Swagger Back

Don’t look now, but the 36-year-old Canadian actor may be Hollywood’s most undersung, unpretentious renaissance man. He’s blessed with the wit of an Oscar Wilde (by way of Van Wilder), the looks of a matinee idol (see People‘s Sexiest Man Alive, 2010), and the soul of an artist—albeit one who gets his kicks from postmodern anus art. Isn’t it time we took Ryan Reynolds kinda-sorta seriously?

DETAILS.COM – RYAN REYNOLDS IS STARING AT AN ANUS unlike any other he’s seen in his life, and it’s all my fault. The two of us are standing—in synchronous dumbstruckness—in the foyer of a Berlin art gallery, where we’ve just been greeted by a sculpture of a headless, armless bronze torso prostrated on a pedestal—ass-up, as it were—with its sphincter tied with a pair of what appear to be bronzed sneaker laces. “Wow,” Reynolds finally says, with a low exhalation. “That’s gonna be hard to masturbate to.”

We pivot to our left, where hanging on a wall is a large white canvas on which appear to be, at first glance, several rows of way-oversize fingerprints, as though cribbed from the Incredible Hulk’s arrest-booking record. A rinse of relief washes over me, because the art-gallery tour was my idea—I’d heard Reynolds was an art enthusiast—to spring us from the Berlin hotel where Reynolds has been living for five weeks while shooting the director Marjane Satrapi’s The Voices. I chose this gallery in the Mitte neighborhood because it was walking distance from the hotel and, from the photos on its website, seemed to be hosting an exhibit about motorcycles, another of Reynolds’ favorite subjects. The interview, as I’d imagined it, would be a kind of freewheeling Rorschach test—the jumbo card of fingerprints, for instance, perhaps inspiring Reynolds to talk about his father and brother, the former a onetime cop and the latter a constable with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the 36-year-old actor’s native British Columbia.

But this is not what happens. Rebutting my interpretation of the painting, with the same ominous tone Obi-Wan Kenobi used when informing Luke Skywalker that the Death Star was no moon, Reynolds says, “Those aren’t fingerprints, man. They’re ass prints.”

It requires zero artistic acuity to see that Reynolds is right. Bouncily, he says, “Let’s go see if there are more butt holes over here.” We navigate our way into another room filled with . . . yeah, lots more. I’m cringing, a reporter in free fall. My attempt to give one of Hollywood’s most dazzling (if press-shy) leading men, People‘s Sexiest Man Alive in 2010, and the star of one of this summer’s blockbuster contenders a highbrow Rorschach test has landed us at an exhibition about what the gallery literature calls the “heterogeneous interfaces that are characterized by holes and passages.” Or, in a word, anuses.

But Reynolds doesn’t care. In fact, he thinks it’s hilarious, and to trail him through the gallery’s many odd and then odder rooms is to be shotgunned with more raunchy comic riffs and one-liners than are contained on a complete DVD set of Family Guy. (A DVD set, by the way, that would feature Reynolds, who has voiced cameos for the series.) Had my interview notes later been confiscated by German customs officers, I’m not sure how I would’ve been able to explain the following scribbled entries: “giraffe anus”; “Gulliver’s butt hole”; “sack of a thousand anuses”; and “Ernest Borgnine’s asshole.” Except by telling those customs officials: There’s a perversely funny guy working in your country right now. A perversely funny guy who also seems, two years after a series of personal and professional setbacks, to be finding his groove as both an actor and a man, if not as an art critic.

• • •

Men who look like Ryan Reynolds are not typically as funny as Reynolds is, for the simple reason that they don’t need to be. Their looks earn them what others use laughter to obtain: affirmation, companionship, sex—that sort of thing. Reynolds, of course, could certainly skate by on his appearance alone. Back at the restaurant at the Soho House Berlin, he looks every bit the leading man, wearing a navy vest over a button-down blue shirt cracked opened to reveal a tank-top undershirt. While not currently as chiseled as moviegoers are accustomed to seeing him (filming “this movie has been great because I’m forbidden to go to a gym or expose my face to sun,” he says of The Voices, in which he plays a deranged bathtub-factory worker. “I don’t think I’ve sweat in four months”), his rippled, six-foot-two physique still evokes a figure from a comic-book illustrator’s pen. Yet Reynolds doesn’t deploy his looks the way other leading men do; if he’s aware of those looks—and presumably someone told him about his People magazine accolades—he doesn’t show it. He’s usually too busy making fun of himself.

“It’s true,” says Jeff Bridges, who plays Reynolds’ cop partner in this summer’s R.I.P.D., with a raspy chuckle, when I tell him my theory about leading-man types and humor. “Ryan has that very rare combination.”

Reynolds’ self-deprecating streak is so wide and deep that when he describes the same trait in one of his brothers as a desire for “stock options in his own humiliation,” he could just as well be discussing himself. A typical Ryan Reynolds story, for example, is this one, which begins with him riding one of his motorcycles—he owns half a dozen—along the Snake River near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Rugged and idyllic, so far. If Brad Pitt were telling this story, you might expect an epiphanic sunset or coyote sighting. But no: “I pulled over by the side of this ravine to take a piss. And when I jumped down into it, I put my feet through something incredibly squishy. It felt like I’d jumped into a vat of old watermelons, and it just smelled like the worst place you could ever imagine.” What he’d jumped into, right through its rib cage, was the carcass of a horse, dead for a week or more. “I wanted to undress using only a lighter. Like, to get all of this off my body with fire. It was the most revolting moment of my life.” Another of his motorcycling stories ends with him having his jeans scissored off in an Australian emergency room after a spider bite and subsequent staph infection caused his leg to balloon. Yet another one ends with him spattered with the goo of a thousand dead dragonflies. “He’s just incredibly funny,” says the director Atom Egoyan, who cast Reynolds as an unfunny father searching for his abducted daughter in the forthcoming psychological thriller Queen of the Night. “He doesn’t seem to take himself very seriously, yet he does.”

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If Reynolds “doesn’t have many filters,” as Egoyan says of him, the credit (or blame) for this probably goes to his being the youngest of four rowdy brothers. He was born in Vancouver to a working mom and a cop-turned-food-wholesaler father. “My brothers and I, we all look and move and sound so different, you’d never guess we exited the same vagina,” he says. “I pretty much got pounded the whole time. I don’t bruise easily anymore. I can’t tell you how many times the cops were called to our house.” But wait, I cut in . . . wasn’t your dad a police officer then? “Yeah, that’s very embarrassing. When your dad’s a cop, calling 911 is really just like calling Dad at work.”

Despite all the punching, affection did trickle through. “I wanted to get an earring when I was 13,” Reynolds recalls. “My brothers said that was a terrible idea and that as soon as Dad—a very, very obsessively strict cop, a tough guy—sees your Wham! starter kit, you’re dead. Like, literally dead. He will turn you into a liquid. But I said, ‘I don’t care. I’m gonna do it.'” And after a trip to Sears the next day after school, he had done it. “I had a long walk home that felt like seven or eight days,” he says. “And when I sat down at the dinner table, drips of sweat were just splashing off the table. I knew I was a dead man. I could feel my dad’s eyes on me, like a laser beam burning a hole through my head. But then I could feel the gaze shift over to my brothers, and I heard him grumble something under his breath that was immensely offensive and that I won’t repeat here. When I looked up, I saw that all three of my brothers had an earring. They did something pretty heroic in that moment. I have some amazing brothers.” “I still have a hole in my ear from that, which isn’t always great in the police world,” says Reynolds’ second-oldest brother, Terry, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police constable.

Reynolds’ earliest acting was for the benefit of his family and friends, though not in the standard puppet-show way other actors nostalgically recall. “I’d fantasize that I had tuberculosis,” he says. “It was just totally weird. I’d believe it, too. I told everybody I was dying from TB. To this day I can’t really explain it, other than it was just an obvious prelude to what I do now, living in make-believe in this hyperdramatized environment.”

“Acting allowed Ryan to be ironic about himself,” Terry says. “It gave him an opportunity to step outside of himself and lent him even more material for making fun of himself. He enjoyed the outlet, but he was also serious about the outlet.”

• • •

Ryan Reynolds is arguably better known than most of the movies he’s acted in. He’s never savored a “breakthrough” role; his career trajectory, he once said, can be measured in inches. He started acting professionally at the age of 13, in a Canadian series for Nickelodeon called Fifteen, and in his later teens “played every ex–Dynasty star’s son in every crappy movie of the week that came to town.” After briefly souring on show business and switching to a midnight-shift job at a Safeway supermarket (“How many times can you sob with Donna Mills before you just go on and try something else?”), he ventured south, at 19, to Los Angeles, where he scored a lead on ABC’s Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place—and the rest, as Reynolds quips, “is history.” More seriously, he says, “I didn’t starve to death in Echo Park for 10 years before I managed to get my foot in the door. I was pretty lucky.”

Lucky to a point. His first feature-film starring role, as a campus party hog in National Lampoon‘s Van Wilder (which did poorly in theaters before becoming a frat-house classic), led him into a string of lackluster movies, such as the remake of The Amityville Horror and Blade: Trinity (the best moment of which comes when Reynolds spits an insult he improvised: “You cock-juggling thundercunt”). With 2009’s The Proposal, a romantic comedy in which he starred opposite Sandra Bullock, Reynolds proved he could hold his own in Matthew McConaughey territory, shirted or shirtless. That same year, Reynolds gained further box-office traction and fanboy cred with X-Men Origins: Wolverine. But the following year’s art-house thriller Buried, in which Reynolds acted inside a coffin for the movie’s entire duration, was itself buried at the box office. Then came Green Lantern, which looked to signal Reynolds’ ascension into the summer-blockbuster stratosphere; he reportedly beat out Justin Timberlake and Bradley Cooper for the iconic role of DC Comics’ emerald-suited ring bearer. But despite what the New York Times critic Manohla Dargis called “Reynolds’s dazzling dentistry, hard-body physique and earnest efforts,” the movie belly flopped; some reports pin its financial losses at more than $100 million.

“Every time I’ve gotten myself into trouble it’s because I’m choosing a project based on a long-term career goal as opposed to something that speaks to me at the moment,” he admits, citing Green Lantern. “When I signed on, there was no script. There was just some art to look at. It was a time when I thought, ‘Wow, I sort of have to do this.’ I felt I had to go forward even though I knew nothing about it.”

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A great chunk of his fame remains tied to his boldface-named romantic life. There was fellow Canadian Alanis Morissette, to whom Reynolds was engaged from 2004 to 2007. Then came Scarlett Johansson, whom Reynolds married in 2008 and divorced in 2010. He began dating his Green Lantern costar, Blake Lively of Gossip Girl fame, in 2011.

They were married a year later and currently divide their time between New York City, Los Angeles, and what Reynolds calls “a little shack in the woods” back home in British Columbia. “He has this gorgeous, sweet, kind wife. Together, they’re really well-suited,” says Mary-Louise Parker, who costars in R.I.P.D. “Ryan has this slightly anachronistic Jimmy Stewart thing going for him—you can just sense his decency.”

Reynolds may be famous for these romances, but it’s not due to any trumpeting—or even mild divulgences—on his part. Questions about his love life are almost never met with answers. “I don’t intentionally try to be evasive about that stuff,” he explains. “If you ask me to describe my relationship, I mean—words are too clumsy to accurately describe how I feel in that regard, particularly in an interview. It’s a strange thing. I understand the climate we live in and why people are curious. But it’s just tough and almost emotionally violent—for anyone, I think—to see your personal life summarized in a sentence.” Seeing the end of his marriage to Johansson autopsied on the covers of the same tabloids he’d worked so hard to avoid was especially painful to him. “He seems genuinely surprised at the magnitude of his stardom,” Egoyan says. “I think he gets hurt sometimes when his privacy is betrayed. It puts a lot of pressure on him.”

Reynolds exudes an authentic sense of comfort about his present station, however, when domestic life sneaks into the conversation. The prospect of fatherhood is particularly enlivening. “We’d love to have a big family,” he says. “We both come from big families—my parents did four, Blake’s did five. A lot of people say it’s crazy, but we’ll only know when we’re there, you know? We’ll walk through that fire pretty happily, I think.

“I think you have to let go of this idea that you can be precious about everything, and let it be the abstract mess that it is,” he says of the child-crammed life he’s envisioning, which, unlike his own family, he hopes will include some daughters. “I’m terrified that I’m genetically predisposed to only having boys. That’s frightening. By the time I was 10 years old, and I’m not exaggerating, I knew how to patch drywall. There’s nothing my brothers and I didn’t put a hole in. We turned our home into a Wiffle house. That’s something I’m not looking forward to.”

• • •

While Reynolds may be happily anticipating an unprecious mess in his home life, in his professional life he seems to be taking a more targeted tack. “In the last year, I’ve really had some divergent ideas as to how I used to do it and how I like to do it now,” he says, digging into a tuna-tataki salad to fuel the energetic dancing scenes he’s to film in a few hours, on the set of The Voices. That film, due out next year from the avant-minded Satrapi, who gained acclaim for the autobiographical Persepolis, is a clear digression for Reynolds. “It’s a psychological thriller with comedic elements, which is a scary way to pitch the film,” he explains. “My character is very effeminate, which has nothing to do with his sexuality, but I liked that. I felt like it was Tony Perkins for the 21st century.”

The Voices will land on the heels of Queen of the Night, from Egoyan, the Oscar-nominated and similarly avant-minded director whose films include The Sweet Hereafter and Ararat. About casting Reynolds in the lead, Egoyan says, “I have a certain brand, and people were saying, ‘Oh, he’s a funny choice for you.’ But Ryan is a fantastic, magnetic, commanding performer. I’ve always seen a serious actor. He’s one of the few leading men with such a level of transparency and accessibility. I think this will redefine who he is as an actor.”

“My sense is that he’s at a stage where he can pick and choose, and he’s doing some different things,” says his brother Terry. “To his credit, he still gets enjoyment from it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this happy. He’s probably at the best place I’ve seen him in his life. He’s content with himself.”

• • •

To a point, anyway. “There’s shit-your-pants fear around every corner because I’m usually stepping out of a comfort zone that I haven’t done before in a film,” Reynolds says of his current projects. “But that’s the wonder of it, the beauty of it. I can’t say I’ve ever finished a film and been particularly thrilled with myself or patted myself on the back. And maybe that’s what keeps me going, and that’s a good thing. It speaks volumes about how I perceive myself. Like a lot of people, I’ve got a self-loathing streak that’s alive and well. It acts as a de facto engine when I’m working, but it also has its extraordinary pitfalls, too.”

A sense of the absurd is often one of the by-products of self-loathing. “I told Blake I was going to do this entire interview just singing ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ and see if you would print that verbatim,” he says. “Just hours of that.” Reynolds cites a 1974 novel we discussed earlier, William Kotzwinkle’s The Fan Man, which he and Bridges took turns reading aloud on the set of R.I.P.D. One of that novel’s chapters contains a single word, dorky, repeated more than a thousand times. I ask him for the one word to encapsulate our interview, with its surprise exploration of—how’d the gallery put it?—”heterogeneous interfaces.”

“I’d summarize it in a phrase,” he replies, harking back to a title he bestowed on one of the sculptures in the art gallery. “‘Ernest Borgnine’s asshole.’ But listen to us! What did Ernest Borgnine do to deserve this? An incredibly accomplished actor, a wonderful human being, and we’ve sullied his good name by comparing his asshole to a catcher’s mitt. What a body of work that man had. He worked until he was, like, 95 years old.”

Do you want to work until you’re 95? I ask.

“Do I really want to survive?” He takes a contemplative pause, the jokey glints fading. “Yeah, I think so. If it could be like the experience I’m having now and again, yes. I don’t know what the outcome is, but I would love if it was meaningful in some way.”

And then, with those jokey glints charging back onto his face, he suggests we return to the art gallery. “Let’s go back,” he urges. “Was that stuff for sale? Was there a price list?”