Ryan Reynolds got candid about his late father, who battled Parkinson’s disease, and their complicated relationship.
The Deadpool & Wolverine actor lost his father, James Reynolds, in 2015 after a 20-year struggle with Parkinson’s. In an essay for PEOPLE, published on Wednesday, Aug. 14, the 47-year-old actor reflected on his bond with his dad while the family coped with the debilitating disease—a topic they apparently rarely discussed.
“He said the word ‘Parkinson’s’ maybe three times as far as I knew — and one of them wasn’t to me,” Reynolds shared. “There was a ton of denial, a ton of hiding.”
As the youngest of four brothers, Ryan navigated his relationship with his father—who was diagnosed in 1995—under the strain of the disease, which only intensified existing issues. Describing James as a “man who does not share his feelings,” Reynolds reflected on the challenges they faced.
“He was a boxer, a cop, a hard-a**. I can’t even recall ever really having a proper conversation with my father,” Reynolds said of his dad, who passed away at 74. “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.”
Things became even more difficult when lesser-known symptoms of Parkinson’s, such as hallucinations and delusions, began to develop. Reynolds described his feelings at the time, recalling how he thought his dad was “losing his mind.”
“My father was really slipping down a rabbit hole where he was struggling to differentiate between reality and fiction. And subsequently, everyone else in his life was losing the bedrock faith and trust they had in his point of view,” Reynolds explained. “There would be conspiratorial webs that he would spin about ‘this is happening’ and ‘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.”
