OVER THE LAST number of years, Ryan Reynolds has cultivated an image of a man, perturbed by family life and bemused by Hollywood.
In doing so he has won legions of new fans, who may not have been as familiar with his roles as they are with his Twitter account.
And what a Twitter account, to be fair.
Arguably one of the funniest and sharpest A-listers on social media, the 41-year-old actor has recently revealed that he adopts this persona to deal with his anxiety disorder.
I have anxiety, I’ve always had anxiety. Both in the lighthearted ‘I’m anxious about this’ kind of thing, and I’ve been to the depths of the darker end of the spectrum, which is not fun.
Speaking to The New York Times, he explains that he often hides his anxiety behind his sense of humour, and regularly relies on his wife, Blake Lively, to ‘keep him sane’.
Tracing his anxiety back to life with a volatile father, Ryan says his childhood ultimately acted as a portent of things to come.
When there’s built-in expectation, your brain always processes that as danger. I became this young skin-covered micro manager. When you stress out kids, there’s a weird paradox that happens because they’re suddenly taking on things that aren’t theirs to take on.
Throughout his twenties which the actor branded ‘a real unhinged phase’, Ryan attempted to deal with his anxiety through self-medication, saying he ‘hoped to vanish in some way’.
The father-of-two, who often conducts interviews while in the character of Deadpool, explained that he finds solace in performance – a process which helps alleviates his anxiety to a certain extent.
Indeed, the panic he often feels in the lead-up to such events is ultimately quashed when he slides into the persona the public know him for.
When the curtain opens, I turn on this knucklehead, and he kind of takes over and goes away again once I walk off set. That’s that great self-defense mechanism. I figure if you’re going to jump off a cliff, you might as well fly.
Ryan is just one of many well-known performers who has spoken out about their battle with anxiety in recent times.
