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Ryan Reynolds lit the summer box office on fire this year with “Deadpool & Wolverine,” the third feature film centered on his subversive, pansexual goofball superhero — and the first of them to be produced by Disney after its acquisition of 20th Century Fox. (Deadpool’s bad attitude remains intact, but Reynolds says there’s one joke Deadpool couldn’t say — more on that later.) For this year’s Actors on Actors, Reynolds matched wits with another erstwhile superhero, Andrew Garfield, who returned to web-slinging alongside fellow Spideys Tom Holland and Tobey Maguire in 2021’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” This year, Garfield reasserted his dramatic chops playing opposite Florence Pugh in “We Live in Time,” a delicate drama about the relationship between two romantic partners over years of ups and downs.
Alexi Lubomirski for Variety RYAN REYNOLDS: Are you asking first, or am I?
ANDREW GARFIELD: It must be hard for you, in terms of anyone taking anything you say too seriously, ever. For the people that weren’t privy to our private conversation earlier, you said some very sincere things to me, and I was wavering. I don’t want to laugh at something that’s not meant to be laughed at.
REYNOLDS: No, but it’s OK to laugh. I would never think, when I’m away from cameras and lights, to ever put on a show; even if I’m feeling crazy on the inside, I will be quiet and reserved and straight down the middle. What would you say your operating system is? What’s the thing you push against?
GARFIELD: I find it hard to describe. I think I’m a generally hopeful, positive person. I’m always looking for warmth and love and kindness in every room I’m in, or every piece of art I’m engaging with. That’s probably related to my mother, because she was this pure angelic love energy — that’s my baseline. So what did your mother do to you?
REYNOLDS: It was my dad, Andrew — thank you for bringing that up. Does anyone have a crude sock puppet that I can use to explain this? My relationship with my father was very complicated. I come from a middle-class, blue-collar home, and my dad was of that generation where he was Clint Eastwood. Simple grunts is how he communicated.
GARFIELD: Gotcha.
REYNOLDS: People tell themselves stories, and we have some responsibility as we grow older to question that a little bit. I’ve done that a bit more in the last five years; I didn’t know myself until I was probably 40-ish. I ask that question often: “Was my dad as challenging as I like to think? Or am I romanticizing that to pave over all these other things with whatever the drug is.” The story is not true; nobody’s black and white like that.
GARFIELD: But the wound is real. There’s an old idea that I really like: We come into this world already wounded. And one of two of our parents knows exactly how to crack open that wound. And it’s part of the destiny of each individual person to have that very specific wound cracked open so that we can actually live into our gifts.
REYNOLDS: I have four kids, and I really need to start working on those wounds. The 5-year-old? No weak spot at all. In your work in “We Live in Time,” there’s so much humanity — you chose this story, you felt compelled to tell it. What is it about the interconnected relationship with Florence Pugh’s character that made you go, “Yeah, I have to.”
GARFIELD: I’ve been initiated recently into a new visceral understanding of how fucking short this visit is on this planet, in this body. And I feel this crazy new urgency. I had a different kind of urgency in my 20s and my 30s, I think, which was, as you kind of referenced earlier, kind of patching over — trying to deal with the wounded-ness. Now, it’s an urgency of living life as fully and vitally … I only want to do the things that speak to my soul. Culturally, right now, there’s so much numbness and lack of awareness of how life matters and that we all have a soul.
REYNOLDS: Your interactions with Florence’s character and how much room you left for her was this radical act of generosity that you don’t see in films too much, because we’re very troubled by nuance. Sometimes as studios tend to drag the consumer down toward the bottom line by their wallet, sometimes we leave all the other shit behind. And what I appreciated so much with the film, your performance, and A24, who obviously makes pretty special films, was that there was room for that.
GARFIELD: Thank you for everything you just said. I want to jump on something you said: I watched “Deadpool & Wolverine” last night.
REYNOLDS: You watched it on your Apple Watch, didn’t you? That’s how I watched “We Live in Time,” and I’m telling you, it’s really fucking hard to hold your attention.
Alexi Lubomirski for Variety GARFIELD: Can you let me go somewhere? As soon as it started, I was like, “There’s no way they allowed him to do all of this. How the fuck …?” You’re the head writer on this film. But I don’t know anyone else who’s doing it, in terms of peeling back the onion of the self-awareness and meta-ness and also retaining a heart and providing a genuine service to fans while also kind of mocking. The layers of self-mockery are kind of impossible to decipher.
REYNOLDS: Yeah.
GARFIELD: I’m wondering how you got to the place of having the audacity to write in such a fourth-, fifth-, sixth-, seventh-, eighth-wall-breaking kind of vibe, and then how did you convince everyone that it would work?
REYNOLDS: I look at authorship and control, or however you want to frame it, as trust. Part of my job … well, I have several parts of the job. One, I have to convince the studio, who’s making a significant investment in mine and Shawn Levy’s ability to land the plane on a dime. And our job is to return that investment. And that really is a big construct of this business.
GARFIELD: You mean making the money back?
REYNOLDS: Well, yeah. I’ve spent a long time doing work and roles that were incredibly fulfilling and nuanced and different and unexpected and charactery and movies that were received really well by critics, but not audiences. I thought, “Well, if I want to continue to do this, I have to figure out how to work both sides of the room and make sure that part of my job is choosing work that will beget more of this experience that I love.”
GARFIELD: Was that, would you say, a practical consideration as well?
REYNOLDS: When I had no power — and I say “no power” very loosely, because someone in my position has —
GARFIELD: We’re white guys.
REYNOLDS: Yeah, exactly, so I say that with a grain of salt. But what I mean is, I would be on big movies, and I knew the stakes, but I had absolutely no input into what happens. And when you have a point of view, and it can’t be expressed …
GARFIELD: … it’s like you’re a monkey rattling a cage.
REYNOLDS: Yeah. It’s a terrible feeling. And when you do try to express the point of view and you say something that feels reasonable, like “Let’s stop spending on spectacle and let’s spend on character” or “Why are we putting all the money in special effects when we could just write?,” and that’s dismissed … If that happens a couple of times, you go, “I own the bomb.” If I’m going to bomb, I want to be the architect of my own demise. I don’t want to be a passenger on someone else’s nosediving jet plane.
GARFIELD: What does the future hold for the franchise?
REYNOLDS: I don’t know. Honestly, my feeling is that the character works very well in two ways. One is scarcity and surprise. So it had been six years since the last one, and part of the reason is that it swallows my whole life. I have four kids, and I don’t ever want to be an absentee [dad]. I kind of die inside when I see their faces and they do a sports thing or something and I missed it. I don’t know what the future of “Deadpool” will be, but I do know that we made the movie to be a complete experience instead of a commercial for another one.
GARFIELD: So good.
REYNOLDS: I love how you did this in “Spider-Man: No Way Home”: You’re weaving DNA strands of a cultural conversation along with the narrative of the movie. You guys did it in such a way that I burst into tears. One of the best feelings I’ve ever had is sitting in Hall H at Comic-Con and watching Wesley Snipes cross the frame and people are crying. They realize in an instant that they desperately missed this person, but they didn’t know they missed him.
GARFIELD: Totally.
Alexi Lubomirski for Variety REYNOLDS: I think it’s OK to appreciate the spectrum of our busness: You make movies like “We Live in Time,” intimate character pieces, and then you also do these movies that have this collective effervescence in a movie theater. The way you moved people in both of those movies is fascinating and singular to you. You and only you were put on Earth to do those.
GARFIELD: It was just very gratifying. It’s like you’re invited to a party and then the party ends slightly prematurely. I’ve got to reckon with being disinvited to this party. And that’s when the work happens, right? That’s when you start to really deal with your own stuff.
REYNOLDS: It’s primal.
GARFIELD: I’m so grateful for it, in retrospect. And even during, I was like, “Yeah, this is soul work.” One of the first photos of me as a 3-year-old is in a Spider-Man costume that my mother made out of felt. And I’m like, “Oh my God, this person, this character, it means so fucking much to me.”
REYNOLDS: In all seriousness, you did sort of steal the movie.
GARFIELD: Oh, shut up.
REYNOLDS: And if I were Tom, I’d be angry.
GARFIELD: Cut that out!
REYNOLDS: Tom Stoppard.
GARFIELD: I’ll ask about Hugh [Jackman]. You guys have a very close friendship.
REYNOLDS: Seventeen years. I love him. He’s just one of the best men I know.
GARFIELD: Was he immediately excited, or did it take some convincing?
REYNOLDS: Disney and Marvel, they were so supportive from the jump. I think I had one line that Bob Iger wanted out of the movie, and we took it out.
GARFIELD: Which was?
REYNOLDS: I’ll never repeat it. I promised I wouldn’t. [Editor’s note: The line still appears in the official script that has been circulated for awards FYC purposes, and can be found here.]
GARFIELD: Dude, you’re a man of your word. That’s beautiful.
REYNOLDS: They were incredible partners. It was meant to be, because the first pitch I had for Marvel and Kevin Feige five years ago was a Deadpool-Wolverine movie in the “Rashomon” style, which is his perspective, then mine, then an objective.
GARFIELD: Cool, cool.
REYNOLDS: And they said no. So then I pitched the most idiotic movies. One was a Sundance movie I pitched them — no special effects, no conflict. And then I pitched one where it’s a two-hander with me and the hunter who shot Bambi’s mom. Their answer was “We don’t touch Bambi, Ryan.”
GARFIELD: It’s weird that you’re the first person to have pitched this.
REYNOLDS: So it was like a year and a half of tap dancing until Hugh called and said, “I want to come back and do this.” I don’t know if you found this in “We Live in Time,” but there’s an element of, you have to have the confidence to fake it till you make it. Life isn’t a TED Talk; it’s winging it.
GARFIELD: I remember I was in rehearsals for “Angels in America,” and it was week two or three of an 11-week process. Tony Kushner comes to visit us in London. I’m friendly with Tony through Mike Nichols, and we’ve been very excited about doing this together for a long time and for me to play this part. And he’s going to sit through for our first rough run-through. We do it, and I’m like, “We got through that!” And I look at Tony. He can’t look at me.
REYNOLDS: No!
GARFIELD: He literally cannot make eye contact with me. And I was literally like, “How do I not survive this?”
REYNOLDS: Because it’s a spectrum of humanity. We all have those moments of extraordinary extremes.
GARFIELD: Totally. And I stood by the edge of the Thames and I’m like, “Oh, hello, old friend. Well, OK. So we have two choices, I guess. We either throw ourselves into the river or go to the next rehearsal. I guess I’ll just go and rehearse again and live in that shame.”
REYNOLDS: You see it in the work. You will sit in that stew of uncertainty you feel. It’s what I try to get across to my kids. I try to say, “You can’t be great at something unless you’re willing to suck at it.”
Production: Emily Ullrich; Lighting Director: Max Bernetz; Set Direction: Gille Mills
