The scene Ryan Reynolds improvised by slapping a child in the face: “He had it coming”
Ryan Reynolds took a very long time to get to where he is today. Before he was Deadpool, before he was Mr Blake Lively, before he was even a Green Lantern, the dreamboat did the rounds in a variety of films of wildly oscillating quality. Rom-coms like The Proposal and thrillers like Buried were big hits, but there also came the likes of Paper Man, The Nines, and the thunderingly dull Fireflies in the Garden.
In 2005, before he’d found his footing as a charming hunk, the Canadian appeared in a remake of The Amityville Horror. Reynolds plays George Lutz (James Brolin in the 1979 original), a man who moves into a new home with his wife (Melissa George) and her three children. Unbeknownst to them, a series of gruesome murders occurred in that same house many years ago, and an evil presence still lingers there.
To put it plainly, the film stinks. The original, one of the first horrors to be advertised as ‘based on a true story’, is tense and claustrophobic, a seminal haunted house feature even now. The remake, on the other hand, is badly paced, lazily written, and, worst of all, not scary at all. Reynolds, like all the other actors involved, is little more than a warm body, given zero personality to work with by the lacklustre screenplay. He really comes alive when George gets possessed and attempts to brutally slay his own family, which also leads to a hilarious improvised moment.
Speaking with Radio Free, Reynolds was asked about a scene where he slapped Jesse James, an actor playing one of his kids, despite that direction not being in the script. “He had it coming,” the future megastar joked. “No, it was actually horrible. I didn’t mean to do it. It wasn’t hard or anything. He looked up like he just won the lottery. It was just so cool to him. And I look over and the script supervisor’s crying, and I’m trying to apologize to her. I don’t know what’s happening.”
Reynolds then tried to blame the incident on the Native Americans who were possessing his character, which didn’t fool anyone. “It was one of those great moments,” he continued. “In a perverse way, I was sort of excited by the fact that something happened on film that was just totally unplanned. And it just came out organically enough, and not so organically that it actually hurt anyone. So everyone walked away from it, but it was definitely disturbing.” This wouldn’t be the last time Reynolds would accidentally injure a co-star, as he accidentally gave Denzel Washington two black eyes during the filming of Safe House.
As well as unintentionally battering his young co-stars, Reynolds also confessed to a bit of intentional emotional abuse as well. “I didn’t ever talk to them,” he admitted. “I don’t want to get attached to the kids. I don’t want to get to know them and love them. I want to stay as far away from them as possible. It helps me do my job better.”
He assured the interviewer that the kids were fine with this tactic, saying that they were “little adults” who “understood the process.” He finished off by joking, “One of them is my financial advisor now!”
Young Jesse clearly wasn’t put off by his run-in with Reynolds, as he would go on to appear in movies and TV shows like The Last Ride, Veronica Mars, and Mad Men.
