The ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ star looks back on writing to his father and including “a list of every amazing thing he ever did”
Ryan Reynolds never had an easy relationship with his late father, but as he’s grown older, he’s become more reflective of their dynamic.
“I know who I am now,” the Deadpool & Wolverine star, 47, tells PEOPLE of the last decade, during which he welcomed four children with his wife, Blake Lively. “I’ve known who I am for the last 10 or so years, and my father’s been gone for those years. But as I look back, I’m constantly putting pieces of the story together that I wasn’t really accepting my own responsibility.”
Ryan’s father, James Chester Reynolds, died in 2015 at age 74 after living with Parkinson’s disease for nearly 20 years. The disease was something his father, a tough and stoic former police officer, spoke rarely of in the family home, but as he slipped into delusions and hallucinations, father and son became more estranged.
“At the time, I just thought my dad’s just losing his mind,” says Ryan, who would only learn after his father’s death of the two lesser-known symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. “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.’ And just stuff that was just so wildly, such a wild departure from the man that I grew up with and knew.” Reynolds has recently partnered with the educational campaign More to Parkinson’s, which offers resources to patients and caregivers.
Distant from his father toward the end, Ryan chose to put a heartfelt message to paper.
“I sent my dad a letter probably about maybe five months before he died, which I’m very grateful I did,” he tells PEOPLE. “The letter was basically a list of every amazing thing he ever did. Every time he showed up or every time he had a catch with me outside after baseball practice. Every time he just was there. And if the man couldn’t express his emotions in a way that was dynamic, well, many people can’t.”
He continues: “The guy was born in the ’40s. It’s okay. So I’m super grateful that I sent that letter. I know for a fact it meant the world to him, and it went back from my earliest memories to present day or as close to present day as possible. So I did get that closure, but I wasn’t with him when he passed away, and I do wish I was.”
Reynolds has past acknowledged that a tense environment at home in Vancouver led to his anxiety as a child. “My dad was never an easy person to be around,” he said on the Smartless podcast in 2021.
“He was like a skin-covered landmine,” he said then. “Like you just never knew when you were gonna step on the wrong spot, and he was just going to explode.”
In later years, such experiences coalesced into something unmovable. “It was very easy for me to dine off the idea that my father and I do not see eye-to-eye on anything,” he tells PEOPLE. “And that an actual relationship with him is impossible. 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.”
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Revisiting their shared history, “I think I could have done better at not resting on the storyline that I’d established between he and I. And that 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.”
Today Reynolds find himself leaning on the good in James, whom he named his eldest daughter after, as he navigates his own journey as a parent. “My dad had incredible integrity. He did not lie. He had this compulsion and moral and ethical compass that was very impressive.”
And the actor is now is using the knowledge he’s gained about Parkinson’s to put a spotlight on resources he wishes his family had access to.
“My father was really slipping down a rabbit hole where he was struggling to differentiate between reality and fiction,” he says. “I wish the resources that are available now to treat that part of Parkinson’s existed, or at least we knew about it then, because it would’ve really given a lot of hope.”
