Ryan Reynolds got his start as a child actor on Canadian television, and then, straddling the new millennium, spent the better part of four seasons making small swatches of ABC’s Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place bearable. It’s no great stretch, then, for him to play a TV writer-creator… well, it wouldn’t be, really, except in just about any other project than The Nines.



The feature directorial debut of writer John August, The Nines is a flawed film, maybe what some would even call a failure, but it's getting a raw deal at the box office, not the least of which because it's a movie with an indefatigable curiosity one finds in few mainstream modern films. Set in and around Hollywood, the movie is a labyrinthine, very loosely autobiographical tale of creativity, collapse and emotional and spiritual responsibility. It features three actors (Reynolds, Hope Davis and Melissa McCarthy) playing three parts apiece in three different stories, roles that sort of overlap but, apart from their place within discrete narratives, may or may not have something to do with one another. Reynolds is the front-and-center star, playing a self-destructive actor, a videogame designer/family man and the aforementioned small screen multi-hyphenate, the character most directly based on August. “It’s really a difficult movie to logline,” concedes Reynolds during a recent spate of interviews for the film, sporting a beard that he characterizes as his own personal salute to lethargy. “Most people want to kind of grab onto what they think is the hook, which is that you play three different people in one movie. And [that’s] not really a hook, it’s actually part of the story.”

“It’s not done in this indulgent, vain kind of way,” he continues. “But... even my parents say, ‘Ooh, that’s the one where you play three different people, I can’t wait to see that!’ My mother’s like Marge Simpson. It’s a difficult thing to explain; I usually just say it’s three separate stories that interlock in mysterious ways.” For the full feature interview, from FilmStew, click here.