Ryan Reynolds: Remember how awkward it was when we were talking about my dad?

GQ: I'm so sorry. I didn't know he had passed away. When you said he was "scattered to the wind," I thought you meant, like, metaphorically.
I love situations like that. I really do. I actually didn't know I was stringing you along. I thought you were totally hip to the fact that he was super-dead. But no!

Ugghh. You had just mentioned your estrangement, so I was confused!
I had a rough ten-year patch with my father. So we were estranged. Now we're really estranged. But I actually had that sort of epic moment that only happens in films, where I saw him before he died and closed the loop as much as I could.

As you get older, holding grudges about your childhood starts to feel petty.
We're all just hurtling through space in this green, spinning shit-wheel of devastation. At some point, you just kinda gotta live and let go. I always wanted that father that was like Wilford Brimley, who would put me on his lap and just dispense incredible life advice and guidance, and I would go out into the world and execute it beautifully. From my earliest memory of him, my father was that stereotypical tough guy. But it was just a veneer. The hardest part for me is that he was always kind of a mystery. I just don't feel like I ever had a real conversation with him.

Did you try?
A lot. And I would get an engineered response, like I put a coin in the Response-O-Matic and out would come this fortune cookie–sized answer. I might ask, "What was your first girlfriend like?" He'd say, "She was dandy. Her name was Nancy." And that would be it. I'd be like, "Do you want to try Googling her? Let's see what happened. Maybe she's a serial killer!" I always thought that the great father-son relationships have this kind of Butch-and-Sundance quality.

In a few hours, you're going to be a father of two.
I'm on the precipice of having a real American family. I mean, I always imagined that would happen, and then it happened. Every idiotic Hallmark-card cliché is true.

Speaking of delayed dreams: Why did it take Deadpool so long to happen?
I've been on the train for 11 years trying to get it made. We did every iteration of that script we could to allow them to make the movie that looked vaguely like the movie we wanted to make.

You Trojan-horsed your Deadpool in through a regular superhero script.
We thought, "Okay, if they let us do this, we'll actually shoot this and hopefully they won't notice." Once the test footage leaked, that created a groundswell of support. And the studio responded to that groundswell by saying, "Okay, here's the absolute bare minimum amount of money that we will give this character. Let us know when the movie's done."

I heard you personally paid $20,000 to use a picture of Bea Arthur in the movie.
It was more a question of talking to the estate and the family personally and just reaching out and saying, "We're gonna take care of this." And there was a little donation made to her charity.

What was the charity?
I forget. I may have donated a lot of money to hunting exotic, endangered animals.

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