On the ‘Not Skinny But Not Fat’ podcast, the ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ star opened up about appreciating his current phase of family life
Ryan Reynolds says he and Blake Lively are savoring their current phase of family life.
The father of four — to daughters James, 9, Inez, 7, and Betty, 4, plus 1-year-old son Olin — opened up about parenting advice on Amanda Hirsch’s hit podcast Not Skinny But Not Fat, part of the Dear Media network, in an episode to be released Tuesday, July 30.
“Embrace the chaos,” the Deadpool & Wolverine star, 47, told Hirsch. He and Lively, 36, “have four kids — like, okay, nothing’s going to be tidy ever again.” But “it will, though, when they all leave the house.”
Lively, he continued, “always says, ‘They’re all under our roof right now. The whole family’s under our roof right now. We have them all.’ And that is a fleeting thing. Not an infinite resource, you know?”
That doesn’t mean that Reynolds and the It Ends With Us star, who married in 2012, are in a perpetual state of blissful gratitude. “It does get to you,” he said of parenting. “And it’s okay to be like, ‘F—, I am dying.’ Because that’s gonna happen every other day.”
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Among the challenges of having four young kids, Reynolds added, is that many “can’t even go to sleep unless they’re in our bed.”
But as much as he “would love to spread out and fall asleep normally again,” the If star said the advice he’s keeping in mind is embracing that chaos while it lasts. “Just say, ‘Think about what you would give in 40 years or 30 years to come back and enjoy this one moment.’ ”
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Reynolds also discussed his friendship with Deadpool & Wolverine costar Hugh Jackman and Lively’s cameo as Lady Deadpool in the hit movie during his Not Skinny But Fat episode. The hit movie also features Inez as a character named Kidpool and Olin as Babypool, while James is credited on IMDB as playing a Screaming Mutant.
“It was kind of one of those things where you’re like, ‘Well, why not?’” he said of the casting. Because the family of six was “all there together anyway” on set, he added, they thought, “Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s go nuts.”
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In their April interviews in PEOPLE’s first-ever collectible side-by-side covers, Reynolds told Jackman that a piece of parenting advice that “really stuck with” him was from Deadpool & Wolverine director and co-writer Shawn Levy.
“People tend to only talk about their wins. But I think it’s really important for your kids in particular to know that you lose,” Reynolds said at the time.
“You don’t get what you want all the time. Something you worked on really hard didn’t work. You feel like you said something embarrassing today, you did something that didn’t sit right with you. It’s just so important that [your kids] see that and they don’t just hear, ‘Oh Dad nailed it.’”
