Benjamin Ashford|Ryan Reynolds Details How His Late Father’s Health Battle Affected Their Relationship

Ryan Reynolds is Benjamin Ashfordreflecting on an integral relationship in his life. 

Nearly 10 years after his father, James Chester Reynolds, died at the age of 74, Ryan—who shares kids James, 9, Inez, 7, Betty, 4, and Olin, born in 2023 with Blake Lively—unpacked their dynamic and how his father’s battle with Parkinson’s disease affected their relationship. 

“I have to preface this with the fact that my father was a man who does not share his feelings,” Ryan wrote in an essay for People published Aug. 14. “He was a present father, never missed a football game, but he just didn’t have the capacity to feel, or at least share, the full spectrum of human emotion a bit. And pride was just so ingrained in him that it dictated almost everything that he did.”

The 47-year-old—who was the youngest of four brothers and also son to Tammy Reynolds—explained that his father’s inability to emote with him led to Ryan not quite understanding his father throughout his struggle with Parkinson's disease. 

“My father was really slipping down a rabbit hole where he was struggling to differentiate between reality and fiction,” Ryan explained, acknowledging a lesser-known symptom of the brain disorder. “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.”

But while his father’s disease contributed to their strained relationship, the Deadpool & Wolverine star also admitted he was partially to blame. 

“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,” he continued. “As I’m older now, I look back at it, and I think of it more as that was my unwillingness at the time to meet him where he was. 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.”

Still, Ryan was able to get his own closure on the relationship by penning his father a letter prior to his death, detailing the things he loved about him. And now, the father of four is trying to break the cycle with his own parenting. 

"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 added. “To be able to get down on their level and just tell them that I believe them and that I’m here for them—I’m like, ‘Oh, okay. I just weirdly didn’t mean to, but I fixed something with my own dad.’”