Ryan Reynolds is setting the record straight about why he’s decided to put a pause on his acting career.
The Deadpool star, 45, opened up in an interview with LinkedIn about his creative agency Maximum Effort, which he co-founded in 2018, and the reasons for taking a “sabbatical” from the bright lights of Hollywood for the time being.
“I don’t want to miss this time with my kids,” he explained. “They go to school during the day and I get to work on [ad tech company] MNTN and Maximum Effort. When I’m shooting a film, oftentimes I’m in Europe. I’m away. There are incredibly long hours. There’s a constant kind of requirement to be there the whole time — not just because I’m performing, but I’m also generally producing and writing on my movies as well.”
Reynolds joked that his daughters James, 6, Inez, 5, and Betty, 2, whom he shares with his wife Blake Lively, “often tend to chew and blow bubbles with every aspect of my life when I’m shooting a film.”
“So allowing myself to step away right now, it’s sort of a perfect time. Not just for my family but also for MNTN and Maximum Effort, to just kind of focus on those for a while,” he said, adding that when raising young children, the time “just flies by.”
“There’s something of a kind of carnival lifestyle in some of the work that we do,” he says of the ever-changing schedules in the life of an actor. “Particularly, film is just that. You’re forming these little kinds of carnival cities everywhere you go and these instant families. I think there’s a real benefit and energy into resetting things a little bit.
“For me, I just want to live like a normal human,” he continues. “I want my kids to have a pretty normal schedule. For many years, when my wife Blake would shoot a film, I would not shoot a film. I would be with the kids, and vice versa. So we’d sort of trade-off. We never really worked at the same time, but always, we were away. So, the kids were away too.”
Now that his children are in school, Reynolds says prioritizing regular schedules is important.
“I really enjoy being a present dad. I love taking them to school in the morning. I love picking them up. I love that I have the hours in between to focus on the things I’m passionate about.”