Mario Anzuoni / ReutersRyan Reynolds loves being a father to two daughters. What he doesn't love, though, is the idea that they will one day enter into the dating world. "I'm doing my part to just wipe men off the face of the planet," he joked in an interview with eTalk's Ben Mulroney Wednesday. Humor aside, he added, "It's the best. It's the best! It's the best thing that could ever happen to you."
Ryan and his wife, Blake Lively, recently welcomed their second daughter, who joins big sister James Reynolds, nearly 2. Having two children to take care hasn't changed Ryan's approach to parenting much. "It didn't change the dynamic. There's just more. There's more love. There's more diapers. There's more all that stuff, you know," he said. "It's really kind of profound. I just love watching my older daughter take care of the newborn. That's been kind of neat to see."
The sisters have their father wrapped around their little fingers. "It's really hard to have boundaries, because you'll just do anything they say," Ryan said. "Like, anything they'll say!"
When Blake was pregnant with James in 2014, Ryan joked he wanted to name his firstborn Excalibur Anaconda Reynolds. "When I ran it up the flagpole with my wife, it was resoundly rejected," he said. As for Baby No. 2's name, the actor joked, "I had the same name except all the letters in the name being silent—which, again, was confusing for everyone, especially me."
Without revealing what her name is, Ryan added, "We settled on the right one."
Ryan was in Toronto Wednesday on behalf of the SickKids Foundation.
"Through Deadpool I've actually met a lot of kids who are afflicted with cancer. I knew that Deadpool had a big readership in the comics. I just didn't think that kids read it as much—but they do. They see something really wonderful in this character, which is that he sort of flips the bird to cancer, and I think that's important. So, I got to meet and got to know a lot of these kids," Ryan said. "It was a funny situation, because you start to spend a lot of time with them."
"One kid in particular, Connor McGrath—I would go up to Edmonton and I would see him. I showed him the movie when it was a rough cut, and it was amazing. Connor, unfortunately, is no longer with us. But you get close to these kids. People sometimes say, 'Don't get to close.' Come on! Of course you get close, and it's fine," he said. "But afterwards, you're left in this kind of spiral. You sort of think about, 'What can I do to actually transmute this pain that I'm in or this anguish of losing this kid?' You just put it into something good, and SickKids is that thing."
Hockey player Hayley Wickenheiser introduced Ryan to another patient, Grace Bowen. "She just sort of touched the hearts of everyone that she came around," the actor told Ben. "She, of course, is no longer with us as well, but I'm still quite close with her parents, Greg and Andrea."
Ryan said parents are the "forgotten wonders" in any child's fight against cancer. "The parents are in enormous pain in what they're dealing with." As a father, Ryan said, "You can't help but sort of project that onto them and think, 'What would I do? How would I handle that?' I just never want to see any kid go through that, nor do I want to see their parents go through that."