Running With a Purpose

Ryan Reynolds had been rising before the sun to take 20-mile runs for months on end. But a few days before the 2008 New York City Marathon—his first—was to begin, the actor wasn't sure his lungs would be able to keep pace with his feet and his heart. A severe case of bronchitis had taken hold and wouldn't relax its grip. Reynolds doubted he'd be able to finish when he woke on race day last fall.

He started off, running and coughing, being paced by his longtime friend and agent, a far more experienced runner. Soon, however, the two noticed that they were moving along faster than they'd expected. "He was telling me to slow down, but he got caught up in the excitement of it as well," Reynolds recalls. "We kept making deals with each other, that the next mile we'd slow it down just a little bit."

Instead, they kept gaining speed. Seeing his mother and brothers alongside the course provided one adrenaline burst. Seeing Michael J. Fox, whose Foundation for Parkinson's Research Reynolds was running for, offered another. Still, even as those catalysts faded, the pair picked up the pace. They ran the last 4 miles of the race, through the crowds in Central Park, in less time than they had run the first 4. "I finished [the race] 30 minutes faster than I thought I would," Reynolds says. "And an hour after that, I thought I would have to go to the hospital."

This wasn't a challenge undertaken solely for challenge's sake. Reynolds is drawn to activities in which the effort-to-reward payoff is clear. He ran the race to raise money for the fight against Parkinson's—a disease his father, Jim Reynolds, has long battled. Still, like most marathoners, he also wanted to test himself. "Marathon running, for me, was the most controlled test of mettle that I could ever think of," he says. "It's you against Darwin."

There's a story the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies used to tell to sum up his country's conflicted attitude about acclaim: In 1957, Davies was attending a party when it was announced that one of his countrymen, the diplomat and politician Lester Pearson, had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. "Well!" an older woman declared disapprovingly. "Who does he think he is?"

Ryan Reynolds is from that Canada. In the past year, he has managed to shed a reputation for being good in forgettable movies and put himself on the cusp of stardom. He played the lead in the 2008 romantic comedy Definitely, Maybe, and he anchored the cast of the 2009 Adventureland. That summer, audiences saw him as the sarcastic super-mercenary, Deadpool, in the movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and as Sandra Bullock's sweet-faced love interest in The Proposal. And for better or worse, his marriage to Scarlett Johansson has brought him a new level of off-screen visibility.

But in conversation, if there's one thing Reynolds wants to convey, it's that he's a movie star who doesn't act like one. Born and bred in Vancouver, the son and brother of cops, the actor makes a point of doggedly deprecating his growing celebrity. He will offer opinions on current events only to add that nobody cares what actors think about things like that. He worries aloud about sounding pretentious or trivial. He speaks frankly, if vaguely, about past performances he is unhappy with. He asks in detail about my job, he asks in detail about my wife's job, he asks how I get on with my in-laws. He apologizes at length for his polite refusal to answer any question that touches on his marriage, or his former engagement to singer Alanis Morissette. Asked to recall the moment when he realized he could be a successful actor, he says it hasn't happened yet.

Reynolds, in other words, has a highly developed aversion to giving off the slightest hint of entitlement. "I try not to have that, I try to never have that," he tells me. "I try to program myself to be allergic to that."

Maybe that's because a full 7 years separated his arrival in Los Angeles and his 2002 film breakthrough, the title role in National Lampoon's Van Wilder, the part for which, in the frattier parts of the public consciousness, he is still best known.

For those who have traced his slow-yet-steady rise, Reynolds can seem like something of a paradox. On the screen and in person, he's witty and thoughtful, and an actor whose sense of timing can wring laughs out of hopelessly dumb jokes. In the DVD commentary to Definitely, Maybe, the back-and-forth between Reynolds and director Adam Brooks has moments of Mystery Science Theater 3000-type drollery—Reynolds at one point describes George W. Bush's face, which briefly appears in the film, as looking like "his eyebrows have his nostrils in a full nelson." He is a great fan of Philip Roth.

But if you google Ryan Reynolds, the photos that come up tend to show him shirtless, flexing his cobblestone abs, his chest hair manicured almost to the point of clear-cutting. That these are some of the best-known images of him bothers Reynolds, but his recent roles are decidedly less likely to produce such beefcake moments. Still, Reynolds's career thus far has made him an odd sort of oxymoron: an amalgam of hunk and wiseass, and a manscaped, bemuscled lampooner of the hollow vanity of Hollywood.

When Reynolds talks about his on-screen work, he describes it as just that: work. It takes work, for example—months and months of it—to turn his body into a superhero's. And it takes work of an altogether more difficult sort, he says, to reach the point where he feels he can comfortably inhabit the psyches of the characters he plays.

Reynolds may not have the obsessiveness of a Philip Seymour Hoffman when it comes to developing a character, but he does do his homework. Preparing to play Will Hayes, the lovelorn political consultant in Definitely, Maybe, he spent time picking the brain of Francis Wilkinson, a writer and political consultant whose early career looked very much like Hayes's. The two became friends, and through Wilkinson Reynolds has from time to time written for the political Web site Huffington Post.

At the time of our interview, Reynolds was filming Paper Man, a movie in which he plays a leotard-and-cape-clad imaginary 1950s superhero named Captain Excellent. The challenges have extended beyond merely bleaching and dyeing his hair an eye-searing magma yellow. As the stubbornly persistent imaginary childhood friend of a failed author, played by Jeff Daniels, he doesn't actually exist. The actor decided that getting into character meant getting, as much as possible, inside Daniels's head. Reynolds says he spent so much time following his costar around that Daniels eventually put a "No Ryan Allowed" sign on his bus.

Whether he's talking about inhabiting characters or running races, there's a theme that arises frequently in Reynolds's conversations: goals versus expectations. He has plenty of goals, both professional and personal, but as much as he can, he tries to avoid having expectations—simply assuming that something is going to happen without doing the work. "When you have expectations, you are setting yourself up for disappointment," Reynolds says. "I didn't expect to finish the marathon; I trained to finish it."

REYNOLDS RAPS

You may not end up starring in films and marrying the world's most beautiful woman, but any guy can benefit from Ryan Reynolds's approach to life.

Plan For Freedom

When Reynolds feels like he's taken the time to figure out the character he's playing, complete with tics and tendencies and viewpoints, a real sense of liberation follows: "I'm at ease and I'm ready for variables. I'm ready to play and ready to have fun with the scenes." By Reynolds's description, real freedom comes from preparation -- advice that applies to any line of work.

Do your homework

More than anything, what drives Reynolds as an actor is remembering what happened on those occasions when he showed up unready. He doesn't mention specifics, but he's been in films, he says, where he just wasn't able to put in the time to prepare. "I was in over my head and I wasn't ready to do the work properly. I couldn't own the moments. They felt false."

Learn the right lessons

The rejection Reynolds experienced when he landed in Los Angeles to act was only a temporary setback. "The next day I was trying to figure out how to get an agent and go a different avenue, to see if I could get on a sitcom," he says. Within 3 years he'd landed a starring role in Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place. Still, he remains acutely aware of just how pernicious the sense of blithe hubris that he brought with him to L.A. can be. He describes his initial, aborted foray into improv as an illustration of the perils of taking anything for granted.

-- DRAKE BENNETT