The star and driving force behind the “Deadpool” films has long been racked by anxiety. He planned to do most interviews for the movie in character, but not this one.
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — You’d never know it from the smooth-operator vibes and Disney prince handsomeness that radiate from his magazine covers, but Ryan Reynolds is often, quite secretly, a nervous wreck.
He gets wracked by dread and nausea before every talk-show appearance and becomes quite convinced he might die. During his ABC sitcom days, he chose to warm up the audience, partly to ingratiate himself, but mostly to redirect his panic or, as he describes it, “the energy of just wanting to throw up.” When we met at the Four Seasons here in Beverly Hills late one afternoon in April, he had barely eaten all day, because interviews for profiles make him crazy jittery too.
“I have anxiety, I’ve always had anxiety,” Mr. Reynolds said as the hotel suite filled with an Angeleno sunshine that perfectly matched his golden latte-hued self. “Both in the lighthearted ‘I’m anxious about this’ kind of thing, and I’ve been to the depths of the darker end of the spectrum, which is not fun.”
It was quite the admission from a man whose outwardly sun-kissed life, and wife, are fawned over in celebrity rags, and who, in 2010, was named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive. Then again, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that the guy behind the near-pitch perfect 2016 blockbuster “Deadpool,” about a sardonic Marvel antihero with a twisted mind and a filthy mouth, could only have developed his wicked brand of humor after a lifetime of alchemizing comedy out of angst.
Now Mr. Reynolds, who is 41, faces the moment movie franchisers dream of: the sequel. The stakes are much higher this time around. “Deadpool,” a passion project for Mr. Reynolds 11 years in the making, was largely unknown, cost just $58 million — far less than most superhero movies — and was marketed with a grass-roots campaign that included viral videos, very silly billboards and Mr. Reynolds’s wry promotional tweets . (“There will be blood. Guns. F-bombs. And graphic, expertly lit French unicorn sex.”) It ended up being a surprise hit, earning $783 million worldwide, landing two Golden Globe nominations and making Mr. Reynolds one of GQ’s 2016 Men of the Year.
It also marked a true phoenix-from-the-ashes moment for Mr. Reynolds, whose high-profile relationships — an engagement to the singer Alanis Morissette, a three-year marriage to Scarlett Johansson — have sometimes overshadowed a hit-and-miss career that included the 2011 superhero clunker, “Green Lantern,” a film he describes as “the hair shirt I’ll wear.”
While “Deadpool” had less on the line, its runaway success meant that “Deadpool 2” will open to towering anticipation — it has already broken ticket presale records for an R-rated movie — and the bigger question of whether Mr. Reynolds can catch lightning in a bottle twice.
“When there’s built-in expectation,” he said, “your brain always processes that as danger.”
The sequel more or less takes up where the original left off, and again presents its protagonist with an existential crisis and a deeply personal cause, an approach that helped make the first one a hit. “Keeping the stakes personal is much more compelling to audiences, instead of global stakes they’ve seen so many times,” said David Leitch, the film’s director.
But it comes with some baggage. The first film’s director, Tim Miller, exited, reportedly after Mr. Reynolds, who was a producer on both films and a writer on the second, fought against making the sequel a megabudget project. Last summer, a stuntwoman died during production, and in April one of its cast members, T. J. Miller, was charged with falsely calling in a bomb threat. There had previously been calls to replace Mr. Miller when past allegations of sexual assault surfaced last year. (Mr. Reynolds would not comment on Mr. Miller, but said he will not be in Deadpool’s next film, “X-Force”).
In March, FX canceled a Deadpool animated adult comedy series by Donald Glover, who created “Atlanta.” The show was not connected to the film, but Mr. Reynolds said he still lamented the news and considered Mr. Glover a genius.
“I would’ve loved to have seen what he did with that,” Mr. Reynolds said.
On the day we met, Mr. Reynolds had been up since dawn, poring over final edits and tweaks on the film. If he was exhausted, it didn’t show. Wearing a suede coat over a crisp blue T-shirt, his tawny hair swept up from his long boyish face, he evoked Tintin reimagined by Ralph Lauren. As his “Deadpool” co-star, Leslie Uggams, told me, “The man is built, the man is handsome and he takes care of himself.”
He is also much more contained and low-key than his many outsize screen personae suggest, a contrast that he said has long surprised people he meets. After he starred in “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder” (2002), about a seventh-year college student, ebullient 20-somethings approached him in bars offering Jägermeister shots, only to discover, crestfallen, that he was “this incredibly boring version of a guy who looked like their hero,” he said.
“Offstage, he’s not bigger than life,” Ms. Uggams said. “He’s not like the Rock. When the Rock walks in the room, I’m sure it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, the Rock.’ But that’s not Ryan. He’s not Mr. Hollywood.”
Part of the reason Mr. Reynolds is not Mr. Hollywood is that, like Deadpool, he is Canadian. The actor proudly adores his home country, and said it gave him a slightly outsider’s perspective on moviedom that he uses to his advantage. “I’ve never felt like I’m in it, like this is my game,” he said. He now holds two passports and is a dual citizen, having recently been naturalized in the United States.
“I feel the compulsion to vote,’ he said, and then let a beat pass before whispering, conspiratorially, “Especially now.”
Mr. Reynolds is also viciously funny. The internet is full of assorted compendiums of his best tweets — he has 10.6 million followers — many about the two young daughters he has with his wife, Blake Lively.
Among them:
When someone asked in a tweet how his daughter might one day respond, Mr. Reynolds shot back, “Jokes on you. We’re not teaching her to read.”
Much of this humor, he said, is rooted in self-defense mechanisms he learned as a kid.
He grew up the youngest of four boys in Vancouver, British Columbia, in a home that was made volatile by his father, Jim Reynolds, a former police officer-turned-food wholesaler whom Mr. Reynolds calls “the stress dispensary in our house.” To head off screaming matches or any tumult, Mr. Reynolds tried to fix anything that might set his father off, be it by keeping the house immaculately clean or mowing the lawn. “I became this young skin-covered micro manager,” he said. “When you stress out kids, there’s a weird paradox that happens because they’re suddenly taking on things that aren’t theirs to take on.”
Yet Mr. Reynolds said he didn’t view his childhood with sorrow. Jim Reynolds was difficult but also quite the character, a man who had a welter of scars on one arm from an old tattoo he had burned off. He made homemade red wine in a garbage pail in the basement, terrible, noxious stuff that Mr. Reynolds still has a bottle of despite worries that someone will one day mistakenly drink it and die.
His father also introduced him to comedy greats like Buster Keaton and Jack Benny, and could perfectly imitate Robert Goulet and Bill Cosby, or recite any episode of “Fawlty Towers.” Out of all this, Mr. Reynolds learned to be watchful, listen closely and to plumb tragedy for the absurd, traits he doesn’t think he’d have if he had come from an idyllic, placid home. (His father had Parkinson’s disease and died in 2015.Mr. Reynolds serves on the board of the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and named his firstborn daughter James after his dad.)
Mr. Reynolds is “incredibly astute in the moment, and knows how to make a moment better,” said Morena Baccarin, who plays Deadpool’s girlfriend in both films. “The wheels are always moving back and forth.
