Ryan Reynolds Gets Nerdy in ‘Woman in Gold’

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Ryan Reynolds Photo: Erin Patrice O’Brien for The Wall Street Journal

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Alexandra Wolfe

Alexandra Wolfe
The Wall Street Journal
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March 27, 2015 11:31 a.m. ET

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Actor Ryan Reynolds was 45 minutes into his first college class, a lecture on socialist feminism, when he stood up, walked out and decided to drive his Jeep from Vancouver, Canada, to Hollywood and try to make it as an actor. He’d had a few bit parts in small TV shows, but his high school work experience mainly consisted of driving forklifts and bussing tables in Vancouver.

Twenty years later, the 38-year-old Mr. Reynolds has dozens of films on his résumé, including starring roles in “Van Wilder” (2002), “Definitely, Maybe” (2008) and “The Proposal” (2009). With All-American good looks and high-profile marriages to two striking Hollywood starlets—his ex-wife Scarlett Johansson and his current wife Blake Lively—Mr. Reynolds is arguably known as much for being a sex symbol as he is for his movies.

So his latest role—in “Woman in Gold,” in theaters on Wednesday—may come as a surprise to those who know him mostly as People magazine’s 2010 “Sexiest Man Alive!” The film is based on the true story of the reclamation of Gustav Klimt’s famed painting “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I.” The artwork was stolen by the Nazis and later restored to Maria Altmann, a descendant of its original owners (and Ms. Bloch-Bauer’s niece), played in the film by Helen Mirren.

In the 1990s, Ms. Altmann tried to reclaim the painting from the Austrian government. She ultimately took her quest to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 2004 ruled that she could sue Austria in the U.S. for the recovery of her family’s paintings. After her victory, Austria returned the portrait, along with four other Klimt paintings, to the family. Ms. Altmann then sold the “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” to cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder for $135 million, a record price for a painting at the time.

Mr. Reynolds plays Ms. Altmann’s lawyer, Randol Schoenberg, a nerdy attorney who wears, he says, “dadcore” (that is, the sort of clothes men wear after they have their first child). The role is a contrast to many of Mr. Reynolds’s previous parts, which have included strapping romantic leads and a buff superhero.

“The guy had no less than 18 pleats in his pants,” Mr. Reynolds, dressed in a leather jacket and fitted jeans, says jokingly of his character. But that didn’t bother him. “It’s so much more exhausting to play a cool guy than somebody who’s just vulnerable.”

Mr. Reynolds considers the film more than a case about lost art. He says it’s also a kind of love story between the two main characters, although the relationship is strictly platonic—an odd partnership, not least because of the differences in the actors’ ages (Ms. Mirren is 69) and heights. In the film, the 6-foot-2 Mr. Reynolds towers over the 5-foot-4 Ms. Mirren. Still, he says, she has enormous presence: “She has a 6’1” face.”

They shot part of the movie in Austria, near where Mr. Reynolds first saw the original painting while backpacking through Europe two decades ago. “At 19 you can’t appreciate anything, but I was quite taken with the Adele painting,” he remembers. “It looks unlike any painting you’ve seen in your life.”

So when producer Harvey Weinstein called to offer him the role—“Hey Reynolds, it’s your lucky day,” imitates Mr. Reynolds in a deep, gravelly voice—he immediately agreed. He had been worried that Mr. Weinstein was angry with him for having turned down the leading role in a new version of “Fletch” a few years earlier. (The remake is still in the works, now under Warner Bros. rather than Weinstein Co.) Mr. Reynolds says that he had been intimidated by following the film’s original star, Chevy Chase, who had long been an inspiration—including for Mr. Reynolds’s breakout role in “Van Wilder,” in which he played a popular college student who takes years to graduate.

Born in Vancouver, Mr. Reynolds became interested in comedy at a young age. Starting in his early teens, he participated in local improv groups and appeared on television shows. The son of a police officer-turned-wholesaler and a saleswoman, he moved out of his parents’ home at age 16 and into an apartment with his brother, also a police officer.

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Photo: Erin Patrice O’Brien for The Wall Street Journal

“I had no business being on my own at that age, but I was a pretty good kid,” he recalls. He enrolled at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, but after that one class was off to Los Angeles. “I was also just a confused, borderline, hormonally psychotic teenager who wanted to go do something first,” he says.

He arrived with naive optimism. “I just thought, ‘I will drive to Los Angeles, I will meet the people [I need to], they will embrace me, and I will be on the main stage within a week,” he says. He first contacted a comedy group and was told to take an improv course.

Mr. Reynolds says that he found his first talent agent “out of desperation,” because he needed to find work. He won a few small parts, eventually making his first TV pilot at age 19. That pilot gave him the money to backpack around Europe. At that point, he thought that he might go back to school; he still wasn’t sure he wanted to be an actor.

He returned to L.A. and took lighthearted roles such as the easygoing Michael Bergin on the ABC television show “Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place” (1998-2001), and he appeared in films like “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” (2004) and “Blade: Trinity” (2004).

Then he was hired for “The Nines,” a 2007 indie film directed by John August, and the part finally convinced him to stick with acting full-time. “I wish I could articulate why, but…it was the first time I’d experienced that marriage between an actor and a director,” he says.

For now, Mr. Reynolds is happy to focus on acting, but he hopes to eventually direct. “I’ve done 40-something movies, so I’d like to think I have some idea of how I’d like to do it,” he says. “Some of the best directors have been actors.”

In any case, between acting and fatherhood there isn’t much time to start directing projects. He and Ms. Lively had a daughter three months ago. He says he isn’t sleeping much, but adds, “I’ve never been a great sleeper anyway, so I’m sort of a born dad that way.”

They live in Westchester County in New York, beyond the gaze of the paparazzi, he says. “I don’t think they’re that interested in me, to be honest.” He likes to spend his time off with his family and doing home-improvement projects.

After his occasional trips to New York City, on his way back home, Mr. Reynolds says that he likes to stop by Patsy’s Pizzeria in Harlem, where he is recognized, up to a point.

“Every time I go there they think I’m Ben Affleck,” he says. “And I’ve never once corrected them.”

Write to Alexandra Wolfe at alexandra.wolfe@wsj.com