“At the time I just thought, ‘My dad’s losing his mind.’ My father was really slipping down a rabbit hole where he was struggling to differentiate between reality and fiction,” the actor wrote of his father, who died in 2015.
Ryan Reynolds is opening up about his late father’s nearly two-decade-long battle with Parkinson’s disease.
In a new essay for PEOPLE, the actor detailed how his father James’ battle with the chronic brain disorder created challenges in their relationship, and reflected on their dynamic nearly nine years after his dad’s passing.
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“I have to preface this with the fact that my father was a man who does not share his feelings. He was a boxer, a cop, a hard-ass. I can’t even recall ever really having a proper conversation with my father,” Reynolds began.
“He was a present father, never missed a football game, but he just didn’t have the capacity to feel, or at least share, the full spectrum of human emotion a bit,” he elaborated. “And pride was just so ingrained in him that it dictated almost everything that he did.”
The Deadpool & Wolverine star said that his relationship with his father became more complicated when James started suffering from hallucinations and delusions.
“At the time I just thought, ‘My dad’s losing his mind.’ My father was really slipping down a rabbit hole where he was struggling to differentiate between reality and fiction,” he wrote. “And subsequently everyone else in his life was losing the bedrock faith and trust that they had on his point of view.”
“There would be conspiratorial webs that he would spin about ‘this is happening’ and that ‘these people might be after me’ or ‘this person is out to get me,'” Reynolds added. “And just stuff that was such a wild departure from the man that I grew up with and knew.”
However, looking back, Reynolds said that he hadn’t been taking ownership of his role when it came to the struggles in their relationship.
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“I’m constantly putting pieces of the story together. I wasn’t really accepting my own responsibility. It was very easy for me to dine off the idea that my father and I do not see eye to eye on anything and that an actual relationship with him is impossible,” he wrote.
“And as I’m older now, I look back at it, and I think of it more as that was my unwillingness at the time to meet him where he was,” he continued. “I could have maybe been there with him toward the end, and I wasn’t. He and I just drifted apart, and that’s something I’ll live with forever.”
The Free Guy star recalled how he sent his father a letter five months prior to his death, in which he listed “every amazing thing he ever did,” sharing that he’s “super grateful” he sent the letter.
Reynolds shares kids James, 9, Inez, 7, Betty, 4, and Olin, who was born in 2023, with wife Blake Lively; daughter James being named after his dad.
In his essay, Reynolds shared how his past relationship with his late father has impacted his own approach to fatherhood.
“The healing for me really comes more through my relationship with my own kids, while taking some of the things from my father that are of immense value,” he said. “My dad had incredible integrity. He did not lie.
“[Now] I get to fill in those little gaps that maybe hurt me,” he added. “I get to show up. When my kid is acting out or telling me I’m the worst — my dad would retreat into the power of silence, and that is not the way to acknowledge your kid.”
“So to be able to get down on their level and just tell them that I believe them and that I’m here for them,” he noted, “I’m like, ‘Oh, okay. I just weirdly didn’t mean to, but I fixed something with my own dad.'”
