Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist - ICYMI: Ryan Reynolds

Episode Date: April 5, 2020

The “Deadpool” franchise gave Ryan Reynolds the signature role of his 20-year career, but its success was far from a sure thing. In this week’s “Sunday Sitdown,” Willie Geist talks to the Hollywood superstar about his decade-long fight to bring that character to the big screen, plus his new life as a businessman and majority owner of American gin company, Aviation Gin. (Original broadcast date: October 21, 2018) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey guys, Willie Geist here with another episode of the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Thanks so much, as always, for tuning in for subscribing and listening every week. We really appreciate it. And I got another good one for you this week. Hollywood superstar, Ryan Reynolds. Here's the deal on this interview. Ryan doesn't have a movie out. Doesn't have a TV show out.

Nothing related to Hollywood. But he did buy a gin company. He bought a gin company. It's called Aviation American Gin. You'll hear the story in the interview, but he was sitting at a bar in Portland. enjoying a gin and he asked the bartender, what is this? Bartender says it's a local Portland gin, a company called aviation. So how about aviation the next day getting a phone call from a guy named Ryan Rattles and saying,

I love your gin? How can I help out? One thing leads to another. He is now the majority owner of aviation American gin. So we talk about the obvious question, which is, are you going for the Clooney play here, which is the Clooney and his partner Randy Gerber, established Casamigos, tequila and sold it recently for one billion dollars, billion with a bee. We also talk with Ryan over a gin and tonic, a heavy hand on the poor, by the way, from Ryan. He really gets in there on you. We talk over a gin and tonic about his childhood in Canada, the youngest of four boys and his family, trying to make it in Los Angeles, including on a terrible first night in show business. He'll tell you that story. And I didn't realize how long it took him to get Deadpool made.

Eleven years he fought for this. Eleven years, people didn't think it was going to work. It's now a billion and a half dollar franchise over two movies, including the big one that was out this year. Also get into his relationship with Blake lively, his wife, and why they really, really don't take themselves seriously and how they love to give each other crap on social media. A funny conversation with just a good dude, Ryan Reynolds, right now on the Sunday Sit Down podcast. It's nice to find you, really, your home away from home, which is an empty bar at 11 a.m. Having a gin at 11 a.m. with Willie guys. Pre noon. Yes, before I pick my child up from school.

That is, as you do. That's going to be a good tabloid fodder. It will. It will. I was just saying I'm going to dress in a moo-moo, and I'm going to burst through the wall like the Kool-Aid character used to do in the 80s and 90s. Keep my eye, on page six tomorrow. It'll be very exciting day over there.

It's going to be great. So tell me how you got into the gin business. Have you always been a gin guy? I've always liked gin. Yeah. I never loved it until I tried this. I was in Vancouver and I was shooting up there, and I would go to this. one particular restaurant, and I would always order a

negroony. Yeah. And they would say, I would say, this is the best nigroney I've ever had. And they would say, well, it's an aviation nigroney. And I thought that's just what they called it. I didn't realize that aviation was the name of the gin. Right. So by the eighth time, I got hip to that. And then I bought a bottle, and it was just

something I enjoyed to drinking at home, and I would send it to friends who liked gin, and that's what they would always switch. And even if they were vodka, I would switch to this particular gin. And then And then I found out it was a tiny, itty-bitty company in Portland, and I was able to weasel my way in as an owner. It's a long way, though, from enjoying a drink at a bar and saying, I like this stuff, this aviation, to being a majority owner in the company. Yeah.

How did you get to that point? Pretty organically, if you can imagine that, it was kind of a match made in heaven. I mean, any organization wants somebody to represent it that has passion that really loves it and is genuine and authentic about it. So I had that. And I love their story. I love that Aviation Gin was actually one of the few, I see it was the first spirit that was created by both a bartender and a distillery. So it really had something special behind it.

I fell in love with it, and I just somehow was able to become an owner. I felt like I could grow it. I love marketing. I love the sort of the mix of sort of a genuine, authentic sort of type of marketing that sets up an expectation and comes 90 degrees to it. So I thought there was something fun and kind of ironic we could do with that. and I just love it. And plus I, you know, I come from a long line of craft alcohol creators.

My father used to make wine. Did he really? He did. He used to make wine in the basement in a gigantic, I'm not making this up, green garbage can. He did not. He sure did. And he loved it. He had such a passion for that.

And it just, it really, to me, spells it out. It really goes to show you that if you love something, and you have real passion for it, even if it's made in a garbage can, you can make a pretty terrible product. My father's wine, I think it was legally classified as a poison. It was, like, if I had a body

and I wanted to get rid of it, I would probably put that body in my father's garbage can wine. Just to dissolve the body? It would be gone in a second. And he made it, like we used to think, he was down there for hours and hours and hours. And after a while, we were like,

oh, he's just down there because he doesn't like us. Like, he's just down there reading Tom Clancy novels and, like, hanging out with crushing grapes. And I remember my brothers and I discovered that he'd made, he'd made this wine for years from, like, a powder. Like, it was wine's answer to tang.

This thing was, it was, you wouldn't wash your socks. You wouldn't wash your Civil War socks in this mixture. And I still have one bottle left. Oh, do you really? Yeah, my father has unfortunately passed on, but I do have one bottle of Jay Reynolds and Sons wine. I don't know why he dragged us into it. He had nothing to do with this at all.

But, yeah, so. So you didn't inherit the wine company? I would never pretend for even a second that I make the gin. This gin has been made for decades without me beautifully. So, yeah, I don't mess around with that. I'm just a huge fan and an advocate for it. I don't know. I sort of like the idea of you getting into the garbage wine.

next. Oh, I love that he, I truly love that he made wine in a garbage can. That is incredible. Just a giant green industrial garbage can. Is it me, right, or does this taste a little different than other gin I've had? Because I think I know what gin tastes like. It's not my number one drink, but I do enjoy it, but this tastes a little different to me. I just kind of, I'm not a mixologist, I'm not somebody who has an expertise in this.

I just know what I like, and I love aviation gin, and I know that this is, so I found out since then that there's less juniper in aviation gin, as opposed to the London dry gins, which have a tendency to taste like, you know, Christmas in a cup. Yes. This has none of that. So this is, I think, why I felt in love with it. It's a, it's just it. And it's also, you know, I, gin is like one of the few spirits that's booming. It's, there's a, there's a modern gin craze, you know, so it's, and I get it. There's been a gin, there's a, there's a, there's a, a gin craze in the UK, and they introduced, I think it was five pieces of legislation to stop the consumption of gin. Is that right?

So if we get back into that territory, I've obviously done something very right. I was going to say, that's great publicity for you. Let's get some legislation. Introduce it. Let's get some real legislation here. It could happen. You mentioned juniper. I hear you drop in a lot of terms here about distillation, sasperilla and all kinds of things.

I'm actually reading cue cards actually right over your shoulder. I wondered how you knew so much. Throw to me. No, that's your cue card. Sorry. That was, yeah, sorry. But if you talk to people who work at the company, I've been there a while, they say you're not just a name on the door. You're not just the face-out selling.

You're super involved in the company. Oh, no, I'm super involved. Yeah, it's a lot of the less sexy stuff that I do. It's the calling buyers. It's the calling heads of huge companies. It's flying to all over the country. I mean, in those last month I've been to Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas. Where else?

London. You know, it's meeting these companies. and talking about the product and talking about putting it in their companies, and it's blowing up. It's, you know, I'm not supposed to say what it is, but it's worth triple digits in one year, you know, triple digits growth in one year. Well, it doesn't hurt to have a movie star as the face of it. And when you walk into those meetings are Chicago or London,

you probably want a selfie with you, and then they want to hear what you're selling. They do, but it's also, it's interesting that the liquor business is not unlike show business, and as much it's built on relationships, it's built on handshakes. You know, and from my perspective, I've gotten farther in show business, just based on having real relationships with people than I have just from having agents or other people represent me and speak for me. So I like to speak for myself. So it's not unlike how I work in the entertainment industry. I talk to the executives and the studio bosses myself.

I don't go through an intermediary. I like to do it myself. And that's something that I think the buyers of aviation gen have connected with. So I like the nitty gritty stuff. I like picking up the phone and calling people. I like not just being a sort of a facade owner, but an actual owner. Kind of in the first, I think for the first time in your professional life, you almost, I don't want to call it an office job, but you're dealing with all the things that come with working at a company like this, including having office email. Yeah.

And you famously have these out-of-office reminders. Ryan at AviationGin.com, we have out-of-office emails that go out, and they're always just different and totally bananas. And it's fun. For me, I like, I love writing. I love doing those things, those sorts of things. It's an unorthodox style of marketing. So it's everybody at the company that I'm lucky enough to work with sort of is on board with the same sort of idea. You know, we all have a similar sense of humor and we all sort of, none of us take ourselves too seriously, which is great.

So this is kind of going around, this celebrity liquor thing. So my question of you is, are you Clooney with Casamigos or Diddy with Sirac? I would say, I think nobody can replicate. What George did with Casamigos is amazing. You know, he's a guy that created his favorite tequila. And I have the utmost respect for what he did with that. I mean, it's unbelievable. I'm a guy who found his favorite gin.

So I didn't create it the way he did. I found this was a huge fan. I bought into the company and took over, and George created it. And he's a great. I love everything that he does. So, yeah, I think it's probably in terms of that spectrum, it's probably a little bit closer to Sarac. Yeah.

Did you talk to George about this? You say, hey, I know. notice he did pretty well on this. Is it a good business to be in? Yeah, he hung up on me almost instantly. Lose the number. Yeah, he says, who's this? Never heard of him. Click. And then just like dead silence. I heard a hawk circling above, and that was kind of it. After that, I blacked out. That's so sad. Blacked out from shame. Just sad story. No, I love him and I love everything he does, both on camera, off camera, in his business world and outside of it. So it's, yeah, he's great. I'm thinking about working at Aviation American Gin and getting a phone call.

an unsolicited phone call from Ryan Reynolds saying, I want to get involved. What was their reaction? It sort of probably sounded like a really upscale telemarketer. It was pretty great. I mean, it started as just a meeting. I just thought about, like, you know, helping out in some way. I didn't want to do like a traditional ambassador type role. Like the ambassadorship stuff is a little phony to me. I wanted to be in the DNA of the product in a real way. And I wanted to introduce it to the world in a real way. So the early conversations, the early conversation were great. They were really collaborative and they were totally into it. I was totally into it. So it just felt like a lot of partnerships. It felt not unlike to give it a sort of

an equivalency or maybe a false equivalency is like Deadpool. It just felt like this natural fit with the people that were involved and we all just sort of had the exact same vision. So it was something that fired on all. You give me a great segue into Deadpool. I tend to do that. I had very well done. Segway omatic. Expertly done. I don't think I've sat down with you since the pre-Deadpool years. So like 2015, I think, I look today. The last time I talked to you, you were working on Deadpool, but it wasn't quite there yet.

No. Can you believe that in the last two years, those two movies made more than $1.5 billion? No. I just got like a weird shiver when you said that. Yeah, it's very hot. Yeah, I can't believe it, to be honest. No.

I love Deadpool, so I'm its greatest cheerleader. I love the character. I love everything about it. you know, I, I love how people rally behind it. I love how kids love it, but not little kids. I mean, kids, we do so much stuff with sick kids, and I love how Deadpool is a character who has cancer. He's a character who has a superhero that has cancer.

So he resonates with certain groups of people facing pretty significant life challenges that I can't even imagine. And so he gets to a lot of work in that space, which I love. What do you think it is about that character, that caught fire. It feels to me like it came along sort of at the right time in the sequence of superhero movies.

Like almost a little bit of a turn in the knife and spoofing it a bit. Yeah, I think there's something really fun about a true rascal, you know, and he works in a kind of space that isn't just that typical kind of PG-13 thing. And also, Deadpool is a superhero that I think audiences tend to really connect with

because he's for the people. He's speaking to the audience in the movie. And there's also something else that Deadpool does, which is he does walk that very precarious tightrope between good and bad. He's always kind of struggling with his own moral compass. And I think that's a very relatable thing

for a superhero to have. A guy with this superhuman ability who has faced a lot of crap in his life and still sort of pushes on. And we also don't deal with world stakes. Deadpool's never trying to save the world. He doesn't care. It's all about the little things.

He's trying to save a kid or he's trying to do this one good things so he can move one notch up closer to maybe heaven someday or something. I don't think most people realize what it took to get the movies made in the first place. Before the first one was made, get in there. Get you some aviation gin. Before the movie was made, it was, what, 11 years in the making? And why did it take so long?

I think it was a real gamble. I think any studio would sort of say that it was a character that for them was a huge gamble. What was working at the time were these very kind of, much more traditional superhero movies, you know, that we're a little subversive and they're all well made. I mean, like the stuff that Marvel's doing is incredible. Like the entire Avengers cast, all those guys, they hit it out of the park every time.

But it was unique. It was something completely different. So I get why studios don't want to take a risk on something that is going against the grain of what's working. And Deadpool was small enough that I think that they were able to eventually take that risk. I mean, our test footage that we created years before, you know, accidentally leaked under the Internet,

which was very unfortunate for the studio. How's the search for the leaker going? I know you're working hard on that. I continue to work as hard as I can. I invest almost all in my spare time in trying to find that bastard, that culprit, and bring him to justice, bring him to his knees, give him a hot bath,

let him tuck his kids into bed at night and own a gin company someday. That was huge because what it did was it gave the audience the ability to become the authors This is Deadpool's destiny. So the audience really was the fans of Deadpool that forced the studio's hand into making the movie. They roared loud and proud on the internet, and the studio had to listen.

So they said, yeah, you can make the movie. You can make it for $6 and a half a cup of spit. And we did. And it became this, you know, now it's a billion and a half dollar franchise. What made you hang in, though, Ryan, on it for a decade? I feel like if the studio said no twice, three, three years. times four times. Like, you know what, maybe this isn't going to happen on to the next thing. Yeah. I had moments like that. I had moments where I quit, gave up, and sort of walked away,

and then a regime change would happen. You know, the studio would get new people working there, and I would, you know, hit them as hard as I could, you know. Nothing, if not persistent. So I, and I love it, you know, I genuinely love it. And I felt like there was some iteration where I could get to make this character. And I just felt like I knew the character, knew this guy in a way that I don't think anyone else could do it. You know, I just sort of knew. the ins and outs of it, and I knew what I was capable of if I was given the chance to do it, and I knew I would do it justice, not just for us, who have high standards for how Deadpool's created and produced, but also the audience, who has a very specific idea of what that character

was supposed to be. And there was a great backstory. It was done so badly in one movie, which, you know, I felt horribly about, too, because it was, like, to me, it was the only way I ever got to make the real Deadpool movie at the time. I was like, okay, if you do this character this way will give you a shot at making it the way it's supposed to be made. Is that the one where you had to ad lib your lines? That's the one where it was in the middle of a writer's strikes. Yeah.

So I had to, yeah, I had to completely just make up all right. In the script, it literally said, Deadpool shows up, speaks fast, a noise Wolverine. I was like, I can do that. But it was, that part wasn't the part that went sort of left to center. It was the word Deadpool, they wanted to, they closed his mouth shut and did all this other stuff.

It was very weird. It was very anti-D Deadpool. And then there's kind of a famous moment. moment where you go to the studio, you said your hands on and you want to talk to the studio, the way you talk to the gin company, and you write a letter. Yeah. And you say, hey, I'm going to go be a different superhero named Green Lantern if you don't make Deadpool.

Yeah, it was sort of like, you know, standing at the altar and having second thoughts or something. I was looking like it was going to do this other superhero movie. And I just said, if there's any way you guys could see it in your hearts to make this character, you think that there's a real chance. Tell me now, or let's forever hold our. piece and they said no there's no way. So

they walked away and you walked to Green Lantern. Yeah, pretty much, yeah. And I think at that point I'd already made the test footage for Deadpool and it just sort of sat there. They didn't know and we didn't get feedback on it. But as soon as that sucker hit the internet it was like on fire. From the leaker, yeah.

From that horrible. Yeah. I'll help you look for him after the league. Thank you. We should go have a... We'll get some gin and go look for him. Make a day of it. We'll do it. Who pick up your kids and love for the leaker. Sure. Have you ever gone back and talked to any of those studio executives now that were $1.5 billion later? No, not in that way.

I know them all. But I also understand their position. I completely understand why they felt the way they felt. If I were in their position, I'd probably do the same thing, to be honest. It's tough. It's tough to say yes. The movies are hard to make. They're hard to say yes to.

People are accountable. These studios are accountable to shareholders. So I completely understand where they're coming from. It was a very unorthodox move to do a superhero movie like that. But, you know, it worked out in such a way that you could do it at a lower budget. I mean, hopefully they'll always be at a lower budget. They should. You don't need all this money to make these things, especially if it's Deadpool's kind of key features his mouth.

Right. You know, that's not an expensive tool. So, you know. Now, you said somewhere that a third Deadpool movie is unlikely? Is that true? Or do you think they're down the road, maybe? Unlikely in the near term. I think there'll be a number of movies that have Deadpool in them,

but I don't know that I would want to make another movie that was sort of exclusively about Deadpool's story, because for Deadpool to work, you have to take everything away from him and create a situation in which he's the underdog. Otherwise, he'd be just so, you know, he's running his mouth so much. He'd be so obnoxious, if he had everything or he was in a good place, it would be troublesome. And we can't just keep taking everything away from him.

So I love him as an ensemble player. I love him as a character that sort of evolves into a reluctant team member or there's duets. You know, I love duets on screen. I mean, you can have a great romantic duet or a non-romantic duet. So, you know, we'll see it. Feels like something's in the works here. I have a few things in the works that I'm excited about. I'm really excited about.

So, you know, that's to come. I continue to do full court press for Hugh Jackman to come back to no avail as of it. Not as of yet, anyway. Not as of yet. You'll get them. I think so, too. I think I'll get him. Yeah, God knows he's just been failing constantly since Wolverine.

I mean, my daughter is not even two, and I think she knows all the words to Greatest Showman. Oh, my kids, too. My kids, too. Every word. They enter rooms sliding on their knees at 145 miles an hour. I'm thinking about opening a tiny, tiny fully stocked hospital in my apartment.

And by the way, that album is still like number two on iTunes a year later. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable what he's done there. And he's the nicest man in show of it. That's right. I think you touched on it. I think part of the recent Deadpool works is not just the action, but your sense of humor.

And so I'm curious where that comes from. Was it being one of four boys? Is it from your parents? Was it being in that kind of household? Oh, yeah. 100%. I mean, I wasn't going to win any fights with my fists growing up. I have three older brothers.

My dad's an ex-cop. You know, I have one brother that's a in the first. the Royal Canadian Mounted Police right now. You know, tough guys. They're tough guys. I have one brother that's six foot ten. Six ten. I didn't know that.

Yeah. Oh, no, you didn't mess with him. He's six foot ten. And one of the funniest guys you'll ever meet, just a heart of gold, gentle giant. But yeah, he's big. So, you know, as a kid, I developed sort of, I think, I think my sense of humor was developed as a self-defense mechanism.

It was, you know, and my father was a, was a very funny man. He was a very smart man, but he was a very tough man. He was a very scary, tough guy. He was a huge presence. I mean, you know, when he walked into a room, the oxygen could leave like that. So I learned to kind of diffuse. I used to refer to him as a skin-covered landmine. You know, he was the guy that, like, you could just go off.

So I used to learn to kind of diffuse that with jokes, with things, ways to make them laugh. And that was sort of how I would kind of, you know, I mean, it sounds more dramatic than it is, but in essence I was kind of singing for my supper in a way. And it was one of the best things that ever happened to me as a kid. It allowed me to cultivate aspects of my personality that maybe wouldn't have been cultivated had I just had this sort of Mayberry upbringing. So what do your brothers think when they see as a movie star and they see owning a gin company and married to a beautiful movie star?

They still gave me crap? I think they still see me the way they saw me as a little kid. It's just kind of a moving target. I don't know. We're all pretty close. I mean, I got to say we're lucky that way. We've all had our fair share of, like, you know, knife fights in a phone booth type arguments. But, you know, we're all really damn close.

We love each other very much. So they're great. They're super supportive. And, like, you know, the same way I'm super supportive of their lives. I mean, each one of them are incredible successes in their own rights and their own fields and what they do and what they love. Each one of them does something that they love to do. You know, so I, yeah, we have a pretty damn great relationship. It seems like you knew from a pretty young age you wanted to be an actor and probably a comedic actor in some way.

The first night you arrived in L.A. When college didn't work out and you drove to L.A. Yeah. What happened that night? Well, we got to go back just a little bit, which is that I was in Vancouver. I graduated high school. I had worked for a year or so driving a forklift at a grocery store called S. Safeway. And I was working midnight to 8 a.m. The graveyard shift. And it was actually great. It was a

great job for me. And I wish, I did a lot of different jobs, but I would always sort of intermittently quit show business and go work. I worked as a waiter, as a busboy, as all these different things. But I love that I started in that fashion because it, for me, at least, it really instilled some accountability, you know. And I was saying earlier, like how the liquor business and show business are not that different. They're built on relationships. But what's funny is that the liquor business actually is the one that has a firm or grasp on accountability, which you wouldn't think it, you wouldn't think the liquor business would because, you know, in, you know, in, in, in show business, you can, you know, literally show up two days late for set and they'll still keep

working with you, which is just so disgusting and wrong. But, but, uh, I love that I had these jobs early because they taught me accountability. Nobody cares if, if, why I'm late or, you know, why I'm not doing my job the right way. If you're not, you're fired. So it was, uh, it was, uh, it was I was glad that I had that before I went into show business. But yeah, then I went to college for 45 minutes. I said, I'm going to wait another year. And then I moved to Los Angeles to hoping to do improv comedy. Groundlings, something like back.

Yeah, exactly. And naturally, you have to take their classes. You can't just show up and get on the main stage. Like an idiot, I thought I could just show up and go to the main stage. So I had to kind of work my way up. And I ran out of money. I just couldn't do it anymore. So I had to either move back to Vancouver or get an agent or something.

So I met with some agents and I said, just give me five auditions. If you can get me out on five, I promise you I'll come back with one. And I got a sitcom. I got a sitcom on my fourth. Number four? Yeah. And a pretty popular one too. It did all right.

Yeah. Well, it was a different. It was a pilot that didn't go, but it led to two guys who grew up at a pizza place. It led to that job, which is still one of my favorite jobs I've ever had. Is that right? Live audience. You know, great people working with great people. I don't know.

Maybe it was because it was so formative. It was the first one, but you wouldn't think, I don't know, you wouldn't think that somebody who's worked in movies for the last 20 years would say sitcom was his favorite. It was my favorite job. It was, uh, I met friends on that show that I'm still just as close with today as I was then. And it was just a beautiful job.

You know, I loved the live audience. I would do the warm up with the audience. And then I would jump over the railing and they'd go do the show. And it was just, for me, it was like a home. It was great. Is it true, though, the first night you got to L.A.? Yeah. You had your car, you driven down from Vancouver.

There was an incident with the vehicle? My first night in Los Angeles was I stayed at this little hotel in East Hollywood that was not a hotel you'd necessarily want to go to, but it had a bed and four walls and roof. And I stayed there. I parked my Jeep outside. I went inside to unload my bags. I unloaded my bags. I came back and the Jeep was gone. Welcome to Hollywood. Yeah, it was the early Hollywood gift basket. It was surprise. You're walking in a same. that is designed only for driving. Yeah, it was pretty brutal.

And then I went for a little stroll and I actually found it. I found the Jeep. Oh, you did? Yeah, a few blocks away with no doors. One of the seats was ripped out. They stripped it that quickly. Honestly, it was like Locust took a run at it.

It was, I don't know how fat. These guys were like geniuses. I mean, they were really talented because they did this in under an hour. I mean, I couldn't. I'm lucky if I get the car started in under an hour. Like, these guys, they took care of it.

You almost tip your cap to them. Oh, man. It was really amazing. I was, if I was a fan. Yeah, I was definitely a fan. I would have left a little fan letter if I knew they'd come back. But, uh... So you're driving around with no doors? I was driving on no doors. In El Nino, I remember that was the year of El Nino and it was just like waterfalls would come through the car as I was driving to audition. So I'd always have a change clothes in a dive bag. So that could stay dry. No. Did you really? Oh, 100%. For auditions I would have, yeah. It was that bad. Oh, it's terrible. It's crazy. I mean, it was the hardest I've ever seen rain in Los Angeles. Is it weird to you after Deadpool? I've heard a lot of people, and I've read commentary. People say, Deadpool is Ryan Reynolds' breakthrough.

It's his moment. It'll be his defining movie. Because to me, you've been doing TV and movies for 20 years almost before that. You may have heard you were people's sexiest man alive in 2010. I believe it was. I was going to bring it up. You can expand that if you want to. I have some copies, actually, in the back.

You just carried them with you? Yeah, deal. We've got made them into miniature cards, actually. emanated cards for people do in 2018. They hand cards over. But is that, kicking around? You're well known. You've accomplished a lot.

Do you feel like Deadpool was some kind of a breakthrough for you? Yeah, I mean, I never felt like I'd kind of arrived, and I think if you do, you're kind of dead already. You know, I don't know. I never, I've always had those moments where's like, oh, this is the one. This is like the movie that I'll, you know, that I'll always remember or change. But movies are very, very difficult recipes. to get right, you know, and it's, I realize that if you really hook into something early on

and you really understand it and feel it in your bones, it works. And otherwise, they can work financially, but they don't necessarily work in a way that's kind of timeless or last. So, I don't know, yeah, I was kicking up, but I'm not complaining. Listen, my expectations were very minimal. I, I just, being a working actor puts you in a 99 percentile. You know, there's, there's very few people that, that my peers that are, are, have regular steady work. I have so many friends that are actors that, you know, struggle to find jobs, and it's very difficult. It's a difficult industry. So, and it's ever-changing, you know, it's always changing.

So I'm not complaining at all. I was able to work pretty steadily for the last, for 20 years prior to Deadpool, and, you know, hopefully I'll have a bit of work in my future. One of the many things I like about you besides the fact that I know a guy who has a gin company now, which is the first thing I like, about you. Yeah. And we're friends. So now you'll always have gin. This is great. For the rest of your life.

Yeah, just keep it coming if you would. Is that you do have pinch me moments. You talked about how crazy this is to own a gin coming, how crazy it is to hear those numbers about Deadpool. Do you still do that? Do you still look around your life and go, how did this happen? Oh, for sure. I mean, man, you, I can't tell you how many guys I've known or seen that till their deathbed,

they're grabbing at things that don't matter, you know. So without gratitude, you're screwed. You know, I mean, you can't. What's the point? If you can't stop and go like, wow, I'm really luckier. I'm really grateful to have this experience and, you know, still get to put my kids to bed each night. I get to, you know, I get that option. We were talking about that earlier.

Most people don't have the option to kind of be present in their kids' lives because they're having to work three or four or five jobs. So, you know, I realize I'm really fortunate. And, you know, that doesn't mean I don't work my absolute ass off every second. I can. But it also, I also recognize that it's, I'm pretty damn lucky. So, you know, I have a ton of pinch me. I hope I always have pinch me moments, you know. It's a, that's a huge part of this.

And if you don't, you're, you know, I sort of, it's kind of sad in a way because you're missing out, you know. You're just always thinking the next, the next, what's next, you know? So, I don't know. It seems to me from the outside that as famous as you and your wife both are, you somehow, this is relative normalcy, of course, but you keep, or at least try to keep some normalcy with your family. Is that a priority for you?

Yeah, I mean, that kind of goes in line with, the general edict of our lives. I mean, we're people that don't take ourselves too seriously. We have a, you know, the, the only people I really love to make fun of is us. And you do it well on social media. We love it, yeah. She's good at it too, by the way. Really good. She gives as good as she gets it. Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. In fact, she was mocking the trucks with your face on the side of them. Yeah, I think it's subtle. There's an optical illusion there where my hand looks like it's, it's 300 miles wide. So, yeah, she was, she was marking there. But I, you know, I, you know,

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I have, I love getting that opportunity to, you know, live like that, and I'm grateful for it. Maximum effort, your production company? That's pretty cool. It comes out of a Deadpool line, of course. It does, yeah. What do you have cook in there? We are working on stuff that we truly love.

We're sort of, a lot of the stuff we're doing over at maximum effort is kind of more in the world of, like, deconstructing genres, which I love. I love the Deadpool, in a certain sense, deconstructs the superhero genre in a way that's sort of fun and playful and, you know, has a good time with it. But I love the idea of doing that in other genres. So, not just with Deadpool, but with, you know, other properties. It's cool to get to produce your own stuff, right? Decide what you want to do and push it out. Well, it's really fun, you know. And I've, throughout the entire process of Deadpool since the first movie, since before the first movie, since our marketing of the first movie, we always had a bit of fun with the studio.

You know, it always sort of, Deadpool's always blaming the studio for stuff or always, like, talking about this. I like that he lets that audience in or gets that peek behind the curtain. But in reality, there's a lot of people over that studio, one of the people that runs at Emma Watts, who are very close with. And I really, in fact, she went to the rival high school to mine in Vancouver. Oh, really? Yeah, which is sort of weird that we're now both in the city. But, you know, I have great relationships with them. So I love being on the Fox lot.

I love having a chance to make something new for those guys, you know, once or twice a year for a little while. And, you know, I love, yeah, I love it. And then you're running out of here to go do a Netflix movie with Michael Bay. So is it stand there and things explode behind you? That's what I'm hoping for. I cannot wait. I'm just going to, yeah, my, my, I'll have, I'm sure I'll have a hell of a tan. My teeth will be 25% whiter and the stuff's going to blow up everywhere.

It's going to be great. I mean, Michael's kind of, he's a very interesting guy, because I think people sort of associate him exclusively with car chases and things blowing up. But, you know, he also blows things up in the sky, you know, and underground sometimes. No, he's wonderful, actually. I'm about to go work with them. I've spoken with them a few times just heading into this. We had a couple of meetings, and I was just blown away. What he does is an art.

I mean, it really is. Like, he creates spectacle in a way that I, you know, since I was a kid, have been all. So I'm excited to get in his sandbox and see how that is. So what you didn't hear there in the sit-down portion of our conversation is Ryan making me the drink before we sat down. He got behind the bar mixed us those cocktails so I could taste the aviation gin. Here's our conversation while he was making me a beverage. Cheers. Cheers. Salute.

Salute. There we go. It's nice. Pretty good, right? It's really nice. A little soda. It's really nice. Get yourself in aviation gin.

And what am I tasting? That's different than every other gin. You're tasting a little bit less juniper, which is big. For me, so it's not going to taste like Christmas in a cup. You're tasting 100 years of magnificent tradition. And just a little bit of soda water, a little lime. That's how I like it. I love the gin.

I actually want to taste this gin, whereas other gins, I don't. You try to cover them up with just about everything. I'd even pour air freshener and drink just with other gins, but this one is pretty amazing. Do you get back there in the distillery and watch the process at all? Absolutely not. Not even remotely. No. I'm a fan of it.

Just a pretty face. I love it. Yeah, no. I'm just the yappy yappy up front. I'm a fan of it. I would never do that, though. I would muck the entire process up. It would be terrible.

No, I'm not that guy where I'm like, where you're going to see like beautiful sepia shots of me with like camera flares and all kinds of things as I walk down the distillery line sort of testing each gin if it's been barrel aged properly because it's not barrel aged. It's gin. You also don't want to be that guy

who's suddenly getting suggestions on the foreman. They're like, oh, what do we get ourselves into? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, actually, that actually sort of forces people to want to drink. So maybe it's not a bad suggestion. What did Blake say when you said, honey, I just bought a gin company? Well, the first key to, I think, a strong, solid marriage is to not sort of speak in the past tense

about something like that. You're saying, I want to buy a gin company. Even though I'd already bought it. It was done. The paper has been signed. No, she was supportive. She was into it. She loves it, you know.

She's a gin drink? Well, she doesn't actually drink. She always says, I don't drink. But if I did, it wouldn't be aviation gin. So, no, she doesn't say that. But yeah, it's, no, what is she? She actually does have a good slogan. It's, it's, I don't drink.

And if I didn't, it would be aviation gin. That's what it is. Okay. That makes sense. Sort of, yeah, it doesn't. None of it really makes sense at this point. It seems she's... This is actually my second.

I'm lightweight. Forgetting basic quotes. Yeah, totally. She's also seemed a little bit exhausted by the promotion for it, driving around seeing your face everywhere. Seeing my face on trucks is new for her. Yeah. Yeah.

When my kids chase after it, that's even a weird. Kids running after a gin drug. Yeah, yeah. It's the first time in my life I've understood, like, those parents that are you seeing in sort of malls with, like, the long leash on their kids. The lead. No. Stop chasing the gym. Don't chase the gin truck.

It's not a good look for any of us. Thank you, man. Cheers. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. My thanks again to Ryan Reynolds for a great conversation, just a great. great guy. He is what he seems in public on top of his work with Aviation American Gin. Brightly currently shooting six underground, a new Michael Bay movie, which will be released on Netflix

next year. And my thanks to all of you, as always, for tuning into the Sunday Sit Down podcast. If you like what you hear, check out our library of extended conversations with all my guests. And don't forget to click subscribe to hear new episodes every Sunday. And of course, be sure to tune in to Sunday today every weekend on NBC. I'm Willie Geist. Thanks for tuning in and clicking on the Sunday Sit Down podcast. I'll talk to you again next week.