#TIFF25 - In Conversation With Ryan Reynolds
- Movie Scene Canada
- Sep 9
- 6 min read
Story By: Eden Prosser
September 9, 2025 - Toronto International Film Festival
Star-studded premieres and theatrical escapades aren’t the only events occurring at the Toronto International Film Festival. Alongside those cinematic moments, immortalized upon the silver screen, lies a far more fleeting, hidden gem: the intimate In Conversation With… series, a programme of 90-minute dialogues showcasing some of the industry’s most illustrious. To commence the 2025 chapter, the festival selected a speaker whose catalogue of work is celebrated internationally—yet whose homegrown roots hearken to the local demographic. Hot off the opening night premiere of his latest produced feature, John Candy: I Like Me, he who graced the stage was none other than the wise-cracking superhero himself: a true national treasure, Canadian icon Ryan Reynolds.
Attending the festival for the first time in over a decade—his last appearance was in 2015, celebrating independent feature Mississippi Grind—Reynolds returns to his home country, this time not only as an actor, but a leading voice behind some of Hollywood’s most successful features. Strolling onto the Roy Thompson stage, sharp-cut suit and spectacle-clad, he seems thoroughly at home. Throughout the following hour and a half, we, the audience, were treated to a chronological glimpse through Reynolds’ personal history: an intimate glimpse into the multi-hyphenate’s career—and psyche.
Though stratospherically acclaimed for a slew of blockbuster fare, according to Reynolds, the works that hold the steadiest place in his heart are not his commercial successes, but instead, the independent projects that comprised his early oeuvre. Character intrigues him, more-so than any cinematic quality; spectacle, on the other hand, holds little weight. Of his featured titles, the two upon which he most fondly reminisces are Buried (2010) and Mississippi Grind (2015): small-scale independent features, both TIFF selections, neither of which surpassed $20 million at the international box office. (The latter barely recouped 6% of its initial budget). As Reynolds swiftly came to learn, strong writing, character performance, are not always entirely lucrative. “Show business,” he states, matter-of-fact, “is a business.” Lacking much commercial draw, opportunities were beginning to dry up; though as an actor, he felt fulfilled by the roles he was pursuing, diminishing returns threatened the ability to progress in a career. So, shrugging, he “started to shift gears. To do work [he] found fulfilling and rewarding, but that could bring in audiences and grow [his reputation] a little bit.” Cue: the Reynolds blockbuster renaissance.
Today, Reynolds is synonymous with some of the industry’s biggest commercial hits. Major studios clamour for him to sign on to their efforts; the Reynolds-led Red Notice was only recently dethroned as the most-watched streaming title of all time—a laurel it boasted for nearly half a decade—while the latest in the Deadpool trilogy still remains the highest-grossing R-rated cinematic flick. Still, the man does not seem much to care for spectacle. “Too much time and money will destroy creativity,” he says, matter-of-fact. “Constraint and pressure…[that is what] will create asymmetric thought. You will start to think outside the box.” $200-million-plus budgets, he suggests, may be the very knell of cinematic splendour, unnecessary in their excess. What lingers with an audience is not some VFX-laden visual—but the fears, the desires: the character moments, humanistic, that transcend from screen to soul.
Take, again, perhaps his most popular franchise: Deadpool. According to Reynolds, “Deadpool is about shame; Deadpool 2 is family; Deadpool + Wolverine is redemption. When you create a story around that…it has a feeling like nothing else.” The beating heart of these stories is not, and has never been, the super suits, the fourth-wall breaks—as to the latter, Reynolds emphasizes, “the first one only has four!“ No, it is humanity, emotion, that underline the franchise entries. “People don’t remember a city exploding,” Reynolds says, “as much as they remember a line that made them laugh. You just need to put something on the page that people connect to.”
As he speaks, the public persona of ‘Ryan Reynolds, A-lister’ falls away, leaving only the man behind the moniker. Actors, of course, leave pieces of themselves within each role, Reynolds—occasionally seen as much a brand as he is a man—occasionally does so more than most. Still, there’s an unexpected gravitas that’s visible while seeing him onstage. He’s open about his struggles with anxiety, self-concept, his attempts to separate self-deprecation (“a useful tool”) from self-loathing. “That’s something [John] Candy could do very well,” he recalls. It’s a skill he’s attempted to replicate, small quips delivering moments of levity in the midst of personal narratives. In revealing his quirks, he grounds himself: not simply an international superstar, but a human, like Candy—like all of us—simply trying to make his way through every day.
Some actors don’t love watching themselves onscreen. Reynolds turns to face it, one arm resting upon the backboard of his chair, bashful smile flitting across his face. It’s not hubris, not in any way: simply an enjoyment of the craft. It’s clear, in every word he speaks: Reynolds absolutely loves his job. He can’t help a grin, as we’re shown a clip from Two Guys, A Girl, and a Pizza Place, the comedic venture that initially launched his career. Excitement is laced between his tone as anecdotes are spun to epics, tangential reminiscence prompting exhilaration. He simply loves cinema, he says. Loves the semblance of ‘togetherness’ it provides—a facet more critical, perhaps, now than ever. “That’s why I love sports,” the Wrexham owner says, “and movies, and live concerts. Collective effervescence”—the simultaneous experience of a shared gathering, a mutual occurrence—“is…very special. That’s why movie theatres need to exist…and to thrive in the way they have for a century.” At that, he shakes his head, entirely serious, proclaiming: “I would fight to the death to keep that alive.”
Over the years, Reynolds’ career has expanded from featured television actor to Hollywood heartthrob: masked crusader, star producer, business-owner, entrepreneur extraordinaire. Such a venture, he says, stemmed from that aforementioned slew of highly-publicized commercial bombs. The misfortune of critically-acclaimed projects that struggled to break out (Buried (2010)), combined with consecutive big-budget action-hero flops (Green Lantern (2011), R.I.P.D. (2013)), cast the actor’s career in doubt—doubled, certainly, by his leading status, his own name attached to each new failure. Realizing the reputation would precede him irregardless of the ones in charge, he thought it might be time to take matters into his own hands. “If I’m going to fail,” he says, emphatic, “I want to be the architect of my own demise. And if I’m going to succeed, I want to be the architect of that win.” 2016 saw the creation of Reynolds’ own production company, Maximum Effort, whose output has encompassed some of the biggest crowd-pleasers of the last ten years; at least sixteen films are currently being helmed under their banner.
John Candy: I Like Me is just the latest of these efforts. Introduced to Candy through Second City Television, or “SCTV,” a Canadian sketch comedy series he’d watched religiously throughout his youth, Reynolds found himself heavily inspired by the comedian, the childhood idol influencing much of his life’s trajectory. “You can see [Candy and the SCTV players] experimenting…and really enjoying the lack of perfection,” he explains. “And you juxtapose that to now, this kind of…refusal to fail, to put yourself in a position where you may be bad at something…[but] you cannot be good at something unless you’re willing to be bad. And these guys were willing to suck. They let themselves be bad.” It’s not an admittance, a self-imposed criticism of his own catalogue: Instead, it’s a guiding principle, one which has permitted Reynolds to rebound after failure, to treat each venture not as a self-defining event, but instead, an opportunity to learn. When you no longer worry about failure, he says, “when you do that… then, you can go be good at something.” As the inspiration of said maxim, it seemed only natural that Reynolds might someday pay tribute to the man who shaped his life. That such a day is today, that such a time is now, could not feel more poetic.
Though Reynolds had secrelty hoped the documentary might, indeed, be selected to play at this year’s festival—“we’d always reverse-engineered it to play at TIFF,” he reveals, Canadian iconography well-primed for a Canadian premiere—not once had he expected that the film might indeed open the fest. What an honour, then, to have received the opportunity to debut in a full house. “John [Candy] would’ve loved that we were all sitting in a movie theatre…[that] we were all sitting in Toronto,” he says, referring to Candy’s own hometown. The sentiment brings a tear to his eye. “It was bittersweet. [It] felt like we were saying goodbye.”
So, what’s next for the multi-hyphenate? “I’m going to do a smaller film next year,” he teases, a cautious—yet unabashedly excited—gleam in his eye. “Much smaller. And I’m terrified… which is, I think, a good thing. But I’m hoping to bring it here [to TIFF]”. If such is true, we festival-goers could not be more excited for his return.
John Candy: I Like Me will be released on Amazon Prime Video on October 10th, 2025.
(Poster/Photo/Video credit: Toronto International Film Festival)
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