Ryan Reynolds speaks candidly about losing his dad James in his new documentary “Welcome to Wrexham”.
The doc follows Reynolds and fellow actor and friend Rob McElhenney’s decision to buy the National League Club in a bid to try and get it back into the English Football League.
Reynolds, from Vancouver, explains how he still seeks validation from his father, who passed away in 2015 after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.
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Reynolds says in the doc, “The main place I got validation for my father was, I was good at sports, so I played sports long past the point where I was really driven to do sports,” according to the Daily Mail.
“It carried on all through showbusiness, an unquenchable quest for validation. My father has been dead for years but that stuff doesn’t really go away.”
Reynolds, who shares three daughters with his wife Blake Lively, adds of his background: “I grew up in a working class family and I had three older brothers, my father struggled in a number of different ways.
“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.”
Reynolds goes on, “It’s easier to think of him the way I’m describing him, a hard-a**, 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.”
Reynolds and Lively named their first daughter James, now 7, after his father. They also share Inez, 5, and Betty, 2.
The first two episodes of “Welcome to Wrexham” are set to be released on Disney+ on Thursday.
