Ryan Reynolds is putting his personal life front and center by detailing some hardships of his upbringing with a very tough father.
The star has opened up in the Welcome To Wrexham documentary to reveal he only got validation from his late dad when it came to sport, and he still feels upset over their strained relationship today.
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"The main place I got validation for my father was I was good at sports," he confessed. "So I played sports long past the point where I was really driven to do sports."
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Ryan's dad, James, died from Parkinson's Disease in 2015 but the pain remains.
"It carried on all through showbusiness, an unquenchable quest for validation," he explained. "My father has been dead for years but that stuff doesn't really go away."
Talking about his upbringing in Canada, Ryan admitted it wasn't always easy. "I grew up in a working class family and I had three older brothers, my father struggled in a number of different ways.
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"My dad started as a cop and then became a food broker, which sounds like a cover for a CIA agent or something but it's an actual job."
Ryan's dad died in 2015
When it comes to how he thinks he would see his son's career today, Ryan said: "It's easier to think of him the way I'm describing him, a hard-[expletive], he'd have thought all of this was wild, he didn't see all of this stuff Deadpool forward so he would have thought all of this stuff was pretty crazy."
The father-of-three has admitted in the past that he was angry when his father died because he "never got the chance to get to know him".
Ryan now has a family of his own and is a proud dad to his girls, James, seven, Inez, five, and Betty, four.
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He recently joked about the stresses of parenting when he said: "I'm a parent of three girls. They're wild. I think they have rabies sometimes."
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And while he attempts to take it all in his stride, he added: "I'm like any parent – I'll have a moment where I'll just snap. It's not so much what you do in the moment that's interesting, it's what you do afterwards."
Ryan then chatted about making "brutal mistakes," but how they're important life lessons. "I used to tell my kids, 'Don’t waste your mistakes'," he added. "When you're making mistakes it's easy to sort of be absorbed by shame and sort of this idea that you've done something wrong, but you also have to look at it critically and use it as a stepping stone to learning something profound."
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