Ryan Reynolds has come a long way from his Waiting… days, when he was simply catering to rude customers by asking Dane Cook to put a little extra “seasoning” on their food. More recently, the Red Notice star has been in some wild action movies that require some pretty impressive stunts. Now Reynolds has opened up about getting older and performing stunts now that he’s well into his 40s.
The last five years or so have been transformative for Ryan Reynolds’ career, but they’ve also been years packed with some wild stunts. From Deadpool to Free Guy and Red Notice, Reynolds’ characters have taken a bit of a beating. For actors who perform a lot of their own stunts, this means they themselves take similar blows.
In an interview with Variety, Ryan Reynolds explains that stunts after a certain age aren’t fun. In fact, they're about as far from the opposite of that as you can get. Here it is in his own words:
Things start to hurt. After I turned 35, being thrown onto cement wasn’t hilarious anymore. It had been upgraded to hell.
The hellish experience he is describing just may be why he has opted out of doing his own stunts these days. The actor has sustained a number of injuries doing stunts, and it sounds like it’s not worth it nowadays. After all, it’s possible that he wouldn’t have been able to push out so many big films if he were wearing himself out doing his own stunts.
In the same interview, Ryan Reynolds does say that he does as much in his movies himself that he is comfortable with. As for the “gnarly” stuff, though, he’ll leave those to the professionals. This is what he says, exactly:
I really like physicality in movies. I think it’s important to do as much of it yourself as you can, But I’ll step aside when there’s something that’s just too gnarly and there’s a trained professional ready to go.
While actors like Tom Cruise may find wild stunts desirable, it’s completely understandable for someone to not want to put themselves at risk when there are people who are specifically trained to handle the bigger stuff. Even if Ryan Reynolds wasn’t taking on his characters’ big moves, he’s still probably pretty exhausted after the last few years he has had.
In fact, this is pretty much the perfect time for Ryan Reynolds to take an acting break, and for him to lay low from even the smaller stunts that are so hellish for an actor in his mid 40s. Even though he has declared a pretty lengthy hiatus from acting, we still have plenty to look forward to from Reynolds. As far as new release films in 2022 go, The Adam Project and Spirited both have Reynolds at the helm, so we won’t be missing him anytime soon.
