Phrases

-I don’t expect success. I prepare for it.

-When you have expectations, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.

-Laughing can serve you in dark moments and even help you crawl your way back out.

-Any kind of crisis can be good. It wakes you up.

-I learned discipline from my father. Not in terms of corporal punishment, but being determined in whatever you do, and sticking with it.

-Are you stalking me? Because that would be super.

-The ‘friend zone’ is like the penalty box of dating, only you can never get out. Once a girl decides you’re her ‘friend,’ it’s game over. You’ve become a complete non-sexual entity in her eyes, like her brother, or a lamp.

-I hope that I’m always satisfied and content like I am right at this very moment.

-I just love bikes. It’s not the safest passion to have, but I guess it’s better than Russian roulette.

-If you’re going to commit to that, you’re going to have to find some way to make it bearable and enjoyable.

-I think you have to let go of this idea that you can be precious about everything, and let it be the abstract mess that it is.

-Wouldn’t that be an amazing super power? Knowing where to press on someone’s neck to make them immediately urinate.

-I finally had my prostate checked. And I was super-thankful that I taught my asshole to whistle before the doctor stuck his finger in there. The look on his face was priceless.
Ryan Reynolds

-I’ve always relied on discipline to achieve goals great and small. At a young age, my father instilled a real work ethic in me – and a fear of men. I always felt like if I didn’t have a natural knack for something, I could kind of out-discipline the competition as it were. So I would always work as hard as I possibly could, sometimes to my own detriment and my personal life. For me, I think will power and discipline are very synonymous.

-People have their complexities. They have their heroic moments and their villainous moments, too.

-I never took acting classes, but I knew I could do it based on the skill with which I lied to my parents on a regular basis!

-There are so few surprises left in life. We’ve gotten so addicted to knowing. It’s the Google generation. We want the answer to everything right now!

-We might be too proud to admit it as guys, but we still need to learn how to manage responsibility, how to face our challenges.

-I think every relationship is going to go through a few rough patches. Those are what make it stronger, I think.

-Everyone thinks their baby is a genius. People find it delightfully refreshing when I tell them, My baby? Totally average. Like, 100 percent average.

-I dragged my wife from our honeymoon in Africa and landed her in Ontario, Canada, when it was -40 degrees.

-If it weren’t so off-putting for my co-workers. I’d wear my flannel, one-piece ‘Hannah Montana’ pajamas, like, all the time!

-Sometimes it’s just enough to keep your body moving. I get depressed if I don’t move.

-When you’re growing up in a family without a lot of money and four boys, it can’t always be, ‘Let’s go see a specialist, see if you’re okay.’ If you got hurt, you just walked it off.

-I just want to finish what I’m doing and go home. I want to have a weekend. I want to have breakfast, a stack of pancakes. I don’t want to not enjoy where I am at this very moment. So, every time I plan something the exact opposite happens.

-Anyplace of work where you have a cross section of work, you have mini-ecosystem. A little representation of what the planet is. You have the Alpha Dog. You have the young ones, the old ones. The pissed off one. The quiet one.

-My father was swallowed alive by his own anus. It was a terrible way to go.

-Each time I take a role, I’m always nervous about it at the beginning and I’m always afraid what if that, what if this. Every time I take a role and I’m somewhat terrified at the beginning and I get into it and I start working, that’s a big win for me. So, really it is stepping forward in the face of whatever fears that I’ve created for myself and going forward anyway and those are always big moments for me.

-I have a discipline that has served me very well in my career and in my personal life… and that’s gotten stronger as I’ve gotten older. I’ve always felt if I don’t just have a natural knack for it, I will just out-discipline the competition if I have to — work harder than anybody else.

-I always say that chemistry is something impossible to manufacture. It’s either there or it isn’t. The fact that you’re friends doesn’t necessarily equate to great chemistry.

-There are 7 billion people on the planet. Pretty much everyone is doing sex. It’s not like you need to order the “baby-starter kit” on Amazon. Instincts will come to you at the weirdest places and times.

-Guys are lucky: We can wear a suit over and over, just with different shirts and ties.

-I believe in energy like dark energies. I believe that when a family moves into a house where six murders took place, there’s going to be some bad juju in that house. But then again what the hell is wrong with you to be moving in that house to begin with?

-Fragrance is a very personal gift, and I think that’s why it makes a great Christmas gift. There’s a very distinct signature to it, so if you give it as a gift, I like to think that it’s from a person that thinks very highly of you.

-Bringing any movie together is a minor miracle.

-There’s an old saying that you don’t ever finish a movie, you abandon it, and I really believe that. I never walk away from a take and pat myself on the back.

-I’m pretty good at surprising friends and family with gifts. I tend to go towards the more sentimental side of giving.

-I see guys with, like, eyebrow art, and I wanna tell them, ‘You don’t have to go too crazy on your brows. Take it easy, man!

If you want a film and they don’t want you, sometimes you have to go fight for it. Sometimes that ends up just being a meeting really, just sitting down with them and just saying here is my vision for it and here is why I really love it. But for the most part, I think filmmakers gravitate towards people that are excited – as excited as they are about the film and as passionate about it. So sometimes going after it isn’t so much a function of auditioning as it is just sitting down with the filmmaker.

-There are guys I admire. Like Jimmy Stewart and – a more modern example – Tom Hanks. They managed to do it and have a really high standard for their work, but at the same time they remained incredibly classy and well-regarded personally throughout the process, which I thought was rare and kind of cool. And I’m trying. I try. I haven’t thrown any TVs out the hotel window yet.

-I was a really nervous kid. I was extremely sensitive. Incredibly perceptive.

-Any great director is also someone who is incredibly intelligent about whom they hire around them.

-I’m terrified that I’m genetically predisposed to only having boys. That’s frightening. By the time I was 10 years old, and I’m not exaggerating, I knew how to patch drywall.

-Hollywood is like a stock market – you’re always up and down and all around. With age, you start to invest less in the outcome of that.

-You have to really make sure that every moment means something, and that every moment, there’s a purpose for it. And then you have to blend it all together without it looking like you’re really focusing on it. That, to me, was the magic trick that was most difficult for the film [Buried].

-You can be deported back to Canada, absolutely, for a shockingly minor infraction. Little bar fight. Next thing you know you are back in Sascatchuan. Which I’m not from, thank God… But it did concern me.

-Four months after we finished shooting, I’d been in New Orleans shooting another movie and my agent and I were having a bite to eat – actually in London – and he’s sitting there and goes, ‘Wow, I just can’t believe how ripped you are.’

-I feared disappointing my father more than anything in the world.

-When I was 21 I think I thought I was 31. I was always kind of doing the right thing, and it wasn’t until my late twenties that I became just a completely wild asshole. So I should’ve had that out of my system already and I was too busy being a grown-up.

-The woman is skin covered prozac I like to call her. Half the trick to a film like this is keeping a sort of emotional level going and keeping an attitude that induces creativity on the set. You have to be in a good mood for that. You have to be happy to make a comedy I think and Anne sort of ensured that every time by expressing most of her feelings through the exciting medium of dance.

-The best directors I’ve worked with, they all have the same thing in common. They’re the first to say, ‘I don’t know.’ If you ask them, ‘How are we actually pulling off this movie?’, they’ll just shrug and go, ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

-I played rugby for years, and I had a rugby jacket that I lost when I was 14. Somehow, my brother found it in storage 15 years later, and he gave it back to me for my 30th birthday. That was amazing and probably one of the best gifts I’ve ever received.

-I’ve done things to my body, mechanically, that I’ll never do again. I’ve done stunts that I shouldn’t have done 10, 11, 12 times. I’ve broken a ton of bones on sets.

-Mathematically speaking, it seems impossible that there isn’t life out our planet. If you flick on the news, it certainly seems like we have aliens among us.

-Anyone who gets divorced goes through a lot of pain … I don’t think I want to get married again.

-I firmly believe that you can’t manufacture chemistry with anyone, let alone a kid.

-Doing a film with your friend is probably the best way to end that friendship but we worked together really well. We just have that thing. Chemistry is something that… I just think it is the last thing in Hollywood, the last magical thing they haven’t computerised. There’s nothing you can do about it – it’s either there or it’s not and it doesn’t matter if you’re friends or not. It was just a bonus that we were.

-I think we can all use a little more patience. I get a little impatient sometimes and I wish I didn’t. I really need to be more patient.

-I’m six foot two. If I need security around me, there’s a problem.

-I learned early on to abandon all those preconceived notions you have about other actors and it’s served me really well. I usually just try to empty my mind of that. I love meeting actors and I love working with actors.

-A producer is someone who actually calls the shots. An executive producer is just a guy that eats more food at craft service.

-I think by take eight you’re kind of going, “Oh, wow, I don’t know if I want to fall entirely off the roof again.” That stuff is tough, and I’m also not 21 anymore. I just don’t like cement. Cement isn’t hilarious any more.

-When I do comedy, my brain sort of locks up in the infinite possibilities. That’s where I get sort of lost. I think, “Oh, there are six other jokes that we could say here!” I feel more at home with drama.

-I have bullshit moments every once in a while – like every actor does.

-I’m a bit of an M&M nut. I like the blue ones. I pick them out.

-I think we know too much about actors as it is and their personal lives and it’s this information age where we’re stimulated constantly by the celebrity buzz effect or whatever it is, these web sites and blogs and different things.

-I remember exiting the birth canal and suddenly I was in a film. But you are never really in charge of that. The movie came out about five or six months ago in America. It was Miramax in the States and Disney here [fakes falling asleep]. What happened. I love working for Disney, not Walt specifically because he couldn’t be more dead, but the company is fantastic.

-I think the reason that people fall in love with Sandra Bullock is that she doesn’t seem to know it in the same way. She doesn’t seem to know it in a way that other gorgeous people maybe would. I think that’s what makes her so accessible.

New Orleans is one of the most exciting, incredible communities in the world. There’s such a rich culture and history, and there are innumerable things to do.

-There’s a very real possibility in this industry of going out and leading your life and then going home and being a voyeur of your own life. You can literally go watch yourself – where you went last night, what you did, what the things that people presuppose about you. It’s kind of crazy.

-My tattoo is of a cannon in Vancouver that I got in a fleeting moment of stupidity maybe 14 years ago. A lot of people have really beautiful tattoos, and I get real tattoo envy. But then other people basically just treat them like bumper stickers for their bodies.

-I find that I get a little depressed if I don’t move my body each day, so sometimes it’s just as simple as walking, and other times it’s training for a marathon or some kind of personal goal that I’m trying to meet.

-I understand the climate we live in and why people are curious. But it’s just tough and almost emotionally violent – for anyone, I think – to see your personal life summarized in a sentence.

-It’s just that… working on Green Lantern, I saw how difficult it is to make that concept palatable, and how confused it all can be when you don’t really know exactly where you’re going with it or you don’t really know how to access that world properly – that world comic book fans have been accessing for decades and falling in love with.

-Too much intensity can be a bad thing.

-Marathon running, for me, was the most controlled test of mettle that I could ever think of. It’s you against Darwin.

-I’ll do whatever it takes for a movie. I don’t really care what that is.

-I don’t personally believe that villains exist. Villains are just a way of saying that somebody has an opposing conviction.

-Acting has given me a way to channel my angst. I feel like an overweight, pimply faced kid a lot of the time – and finding a way to access that insecurity, and put it toward something creative is incredibly rewarding. I feel very lucky.

-When I’m not training for a movie, it’s more relaxed. I do a lot of running. Usually I’ll run four to six miles about three times a week. You try to eat right, but you don’t always.

-Every time I hangout with Sandra Bullock I think I want to be her. I want to be married to Jesse James.

-I think some of the best movie stars in the world are guys who stay in their lane. You can lose an audience if you start saying, “Now I really want to do something that is just for me, but on a massive scale.” That’s a dangerous mix.

-Graphic novels and comic books offer an easy foothold into that world, and screenwriters and studio execs gravitate toward those, because I think they can see it all right there. It’s like, “Here’s what the movie looks like.”

-I’m like the queen of planning and scheduling and I’m trying very hard to stop it.

-I have daddy issues. So I keep tissues on me at all times.

-I can’t say I’ve ever finished a film and been particularly thrilled with myself or patted myself on the back. And maybe that’s what keeps me going, and that’s a good thing. It speaks volumes about how I perceive myself.

-I come from a family of cops, and all of them share that understanding that they put their lives on the line.

-Well, I came down to LA initially to join The Groundlings, which is an improv comedy group. I didn’t get in, of course, becaue I’m not a part of The Groundlings. I just assumed that I could walk in and take over. So they said: “Hit the road Jack.” And I ended up getting an agent instead. They sent me out on a couple of leads and I ended up on a sitcom and Van Wilder thereafter and then pantsless with Sandra Bullock.

-I’m one of the most fortunate guys around,I still get to do those kinds of movies, and then I get to do Green Lantern, and I get to do Buried with an auteur like Rodrigo Cortés. I enjoy that I can get away with that.

-Honestly, I think it’s dumb luck that I’m able to kind of get away doing different types of films in different genres. There’s always a tendency to kind of stick with what works, or stick with one particular kind of brand or movie. But so far I’ve been getting away with it, so I’m going to continue to do that for as long as I can.

-It’s a nice visual. I had just done Blade and I put on more weight for Blade and I thought I might as well use it so I kept it and added a little more. I wanted him to be a big bear.

-When your dad’s a cop, calling 911 is really just like calling Dad at work.

-I’m going to admit when I’m clueless, and I’m going to ask people for help when I don’t know the answer to something.

-I don’t know if you’ve ever had insomnia, but it’s a really terrible feeling when it’s days and weeks on end. It was kind of awful.

-I run in a pair of New Balances with a thinner sole, but they’re nothing like those barefoot shoes that show all five toes. I have a bit of a phobia about those.

-I don’t think it’s necessarily 100-percent true. But comic books have infiltrated the mainstream Hollywood in ways that I don’t think I ever would have seen or thought imaginable a while ago. But it’s also cyclical. You saw it in the ’80s when it became kind of huge again. And then it disappears for a while, then it comes back again, then it disappears for a while. So yeah, there’s something about that.

-I think theres escapist moviemaking, and we want to be captivated and taken away. If its done right, you can craft an incredible film. There have been superhero films that I think are brilliant pieces of art.

-Michael Keaton had a great, great career. I do remember when I was a young guy thinking about him, about how he’d had the chance to do it all, so yeah. But, there’s nobody where I’ve said, “Man, I really want that guy’s career.”

-I don’t think you can help but personalize a role. You almost play to none of the preconceived notions of it. It’s more or less a personal experience and journey.