Ryan Reynolds Had ‘Absentee’ Dad Fears While Making Deadpool Films

Creating a healthy work-life balance can be tricky for anyone, especially when you’re writing and starring in one of the biggest superhero film franchises.

Ryan Reynolds teased what’s in store for Deadpool’s future in the Marvel Cinematic Universe while talking with Andrew Garfield for Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series on Monday, December 9. In particular, he opened up about how wanting to be there for his and wife Blake Lively’s four kids could have a hand in when and where fans see Deadpool next.

“My feeling is that character works very well in two ways, one is scarcity and surprise,” he said while talking about the success of Deadpool & Wolverine, which was released in July. “It had been six years since the last one [2018’s Deadpool 2], and part of the reason is that it swallows my whole life. You can’t take your hand off the stick all the way through development, through postproduction into marketing and promo, and then, you kind of [stop].”

Discussing his children, he added: “I don’t ever want to be absentee, and I don’t ever want to miss stuff. I, like, kind of die inside when I see their face and they have a competition or they have a sports thing or something and I missed it.”

Reynolds and Lively, who wed in 2012, are parents to daughters James, 9, Inez, 8, and Betty, 5, as well as son Olin, born in February 2023. Reynolds turned Deadpool & Wolverine into a family affair by letting his wife and kids make cameos as the Deadpool variants Ladypool, Kidpool and Babypool.

Deadpool & Wolverine marked Reynolds’ third solo outing as the merc with a mouth and saw him team up with an alternate version of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine to help save his universe from extinction. The movie dominated the summer, earning over $1.3 billion at the worldwide box office, per Forbes. It has since become the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time.

Despite the film’s accomplishments, Reynolds admitted he doesn’t know when Deadpool will return. “I do know that [director] Shawn [Levy] and I made the movie to have a beginning, a middle and an end and be a complete experience instead of a commercial for another one,” he stated. “And I think it’s, sort of, important sometimes to make space for a movie to just be a movie.”

As for Deadpool’s next onscreen appearance, Reynolds said the character could take a step back from the spotlight. “I see Deadpool as a supporting character much more than he is a main [character], the center,” he shared. “We center him sometimes because that’s what they want, but you can’t center him unless you take everything away from him. You have to create a situation where he’s so much the underdog, and I don’t think I can do that again. So, if he comes back, it’s gonna be in someone else’s movie.”

Reynolds even has a potential project in mind that he’d want to see Deadpool appear in. “Channing Tatum was so excited to play Gambit [in Deadpool & Wolverine], and I would happily be the fifth banana in his movie or anyone else’s,” he said.

Fans will have to wait and see when Deadpool will make his way back to the MCU. But for now, Reynolds is holding viewers over with another exciting project. “I’m spending the year writing,” he teased in an interview with Variety last month. “I’m writing a movie for myself, Hugh and Shawn to do that is not Marvel.”