Ryan Reynolds opened up to People about his late father’s terrifying battle with Parkinson’s, which the Deadpool & Wolverine star said “destabilized” their relationship with one another.
Reynolds was 22 when his “present” but “hard-ass” former cop father, James, was diagnosed with the nervous system disorder, which causes dopamine levels to drop through nerve damage in the brain. “He said the word ‘Parkinson’s’ maybe three times as far as I knew—and one of them wasn’t to me. There was a ton of denial, a ton of hiding,” Reynolds said of his dad, who lived with the disease for almost 20 years before dying in 2015 at age 74.
Ten years after James was diagnosed, he began struggling with hallucinations and paranoid delusions, lesser-known Parkinson’s symptoms. “It really destabilized my relationship with him because I didn’t really know what was happening,” Reynolds recalled. “At the time I just thought, ‘My dad’s losing his mind.’ There would be conspiratorial webs that he would spin about ‘this is happening’ and that ‘these people might be after me’ or ‘this person is out to get me.’ And just stuff that was such a wild departure from the man that I grew up with and knew.”
Reynolds admitted that when he was younger it was “very easy for me to dine off the idea that my father and I do not see eye to eye on anything and that an actual relationship with him is impossible.” But now, as a father to four children of his own, Reynolds feels “that was my unwillingness at the time to meet him where he was.”
Reynolds continued: “I could have maybe been there with him toward the end, and I wasn’t. He and I just drifted apart, and that’s something I’ll live with forever.”
Reynolds said that because his dad was born “in the ‘40s” he was unable “to express his emotions in a way that was dynamic.” As a result, “I can’t even recall ever really having a proper conversation with my father,” the actor revealed.
Five months before James died, though, Reynolds sent him a heartfelt letter which was “a list of every amazing thing he ever did—every time he showed up, or every time he had a catch with me outside after baseball practice. Every time he just was there.”
Reynolds concluded: “I’m super grateful that I sent that letter. I know for a fact it meant the world to him. So I did get that closure, but I wasn’t with him when he passed away, and I do wish I was.”
But Reynolds finds hope in his relationship with his own children, whom he shares with Blake Lively . “The healing for me really comes more through my relationship with my own kids, while taking some of the things from my father that are of immense value,” he explained. “My dad had incredible integrity. He did not lie. [Now] I get to fill in those little gaps that maybe hurt me. I get to show up.”
You can find additional information about Parkinson’s at More to Parkinson’s .
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