process is the edit room, and that’s true. But if you just have that natural chemistry, God, it’s beautiful, I mean, it is just a wonder ful thing. So Sandra Bullock had been a f r iend of mine for over a decade before we even shot ‘The Proposal’. One of my greatest memor ies I have is dancing in a nightclub all night with Sandra and George Michael, like all night - and I go to bed at 8.30pm [laughs]. We had so much fun on that movie and you can feel it. Howard Hawk s is a filmmaker who I love, I think he’s been dead about 422 year s, but he would do f ilms where the scr ipts were about 200 pages long because the dialogue was so rapid-f ire, it was so fast - and I always felt like that was Sandy. We would have this back and for th that was just like a Gatling gun of words – and it was a beautiful thing. I feel like that with Hugh Jackman, who is my other romantic comedy par tner [laughs]. I’ve known him for 17 years now and it’s a bit like that, you know?
and I got a sitcom. My expectations were always nothing, like minimal. I was so happy if I just got the job as the wack y neighbour to the wack y neighbour, you know, every third episode. But no, it really was great because we didn’t exper ience this excessive fame or any of the things that come along with that, but I really got to exper iment and play. And this is where my Canadian roots worked against me, in some ways, because I remember I was on stage and one of best pieces of advice I ever got was f rom Danny Jacobson, who was the creator of a show called ‘Mad About You’, wonder ful guy, his niece I work with, Wendy Jacobson, on all the Marvel stuf f now. She’s an executive over there. But Danny pulled me aside, I think it was the third episode we’d ever shot of ‘Two Guys, and a Gir l’, and he noticed I’d throttle, like I’d pull back in f ront of the live audience. And it was because I was trying to give my co-star s space to shine, because that’s what improv is. And I kept sor t of mak ing room for that, and you can’t really do that on the sitcom; you have to take the stage. And that’s what Danny said. He pulled me aside and he grabbed me by the scruf f and he went, ‘Reynolds, take the f—k ing stage. Take it.’ And I said Danny, ‘ I’m peeing r ight now [laughs]. You fr ightened me, you’re large and you’re powerful.’ And he said, ‘Take it! And if you take the stage, you will help that per son, and everyone will get better, ’ and he was right. And then it led to a movie. I got a movie called ‘National Lampoon’s Van Wilder ’. And I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing, I was just doing impressions of the people. It’s like, ‘National Lampoon’s - I gotta work on my Chevy Chase.’ And I did.
For the next phase in your career, you played many lead roles in a number of highly popular romantic comedies – ‘Definitely, Maybe’ and ‘The Proposal’ etc. Is there a secret to creating the kind of on-screen chemistry that you need with your co-leads for the success of this type of genre? That’s a great question. Chemistry is something that is either there or it’s not. You can create it, though, in the edit room. In the edit room, when you overlap dialogue, it’s chemistr y. I t feels exactly like chemistry. So when you get two characters talk ing at the same time, we can still hear what they’re saying, but it sounds like they’re comfortable with each other. They say the last par t of
the wr iting
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With Sandra Bullock, is there much ad-libbing? Well, there’s some ad-libbing, for sure. I mean, but this [‘The Proposal’ ] is a stage in my career where I’m not ready to have authorship, though. So, I ’m really trying to just show up, make the people I ’m work ing with happy. And that’s my job. When you’re work ing with someone like Sandra, if you work with a great tennis player, you just get better, you k now? So, batting the ball back with her was just a dream. And I got better. And she invited me to play a lot more. So, yeah, there’s tonnes of improv, there’s tonnes of little moments you f ind. Now, when you sor t of fast forward just a little bit to, I don’t know, for me, it was around 2014, at this point, I ’m a little bit, you k now, how do I put it? I’m in actor jail. [laughs] You know, not getting a lot of work . I ’ve had some big sor t of highly-publicised bombs. And that’s where you k ind of go, ‘Well, hold on a second. I have no authorship in that. I f I’m going to fail, I’d rather be the architect of my own demise and if I’m going to succeed, I would want to be the architect of that win.’ So, I started to think about it a little bit dif ferently then and take a lot more authorship of the situation. And that really changed my entire life. But I wouldn’t have been able to do that had I not worked with people like Sandra, worked with incredible actors like Rachel Weisz and just watching these people who have spent their lifetime per fecting a craf t while I’ve spent most of my life d-ck ing around.
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INTERVIEW RYAN R E Y N O L D S
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