Ryan Reynolds has revealed how his father's battle with Parkinson's affected their relationship.
The Deadpool star has opened up about his father James Reynolds' battle with Parkinson's disease and how it affected their relationship.
"He said the word 'Parkinson's' maybe three times as far as I knew - and one of them wasn't to me," Ryan recalled of his father in a new interview with People. "There was a ton of denial, a ton of hiding."
James lived with the disease for nearly 20 years, until his death in 2015 at the age of 74.
Ryan, who was 22 when James was diagnosed with Parkinson's, explained that his father suffered from delusions and hallucinations, which affected their relationship.
"It really destabilised my relationship with him because I didn't really know what was happening," the actor told the outlet.
Ryan went on to explain that his father struggled to open up.
"He was a boxer, a cop, a hard-a**. I can't even recall ever really having a proper conversation with my father," he shared. "He was a present father, never missed a football game, but he just didn't have the capacity to feel, or at least share, the full spectrum of human emotion a bit."
The Proposal star said he thought his father was "losing his mind" at the time when he began suffering from hallucinations and delusions.
"There would be conspiratorial webs that he would spin about 'this is happening' and that 'these people might be after me' or 'this person is out to get me,'" he recalled. "And just stuff that was such a wild departure from the man that I grew up with and knew."
Ryan told the outlet that since his father's death, he has reflected on their relationship.
"And as I'm older now, I look back at it, and I think of it more as that was my unwillingness at the time to meet him where he was," he admitted. "I could have maybe been there with him toward the end, and I wasn't. He and I just drifted apart, and that's something I'll live with forever."
