Matthew Lawrence claims a “young” Ryan Reynolds was difficult to work with in the early aughts.
via: People
Matthew Lawrence looked back back at one of his less famous roles — and his time working with Ryan Reynolds — on the Feb. 21 episode of Brotherly Love Podcast.
In the episode, Matthew, 45, and his brothers Joey and Andrew discussed the ongoing legal battle between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. But Matthew also remembered that he once worked with Reynolds, 48.
“Ryan’s amazing,” Andy, 37 said, before noting that Matthew had worked on a movie with him. “He was a total schlub then,” he added.
The movie was Boltneck, a 1998 TV horror comedy that also starred Step by Step's Christine Lakin. Based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it follows Matthew’s character Frank, who gets into supernatural hijinks with Reynolds’ Karl.
“I’m like a science, weird nerd,” Matthew explained. “And Ryan Reynolds is my Frankenstein.” The movie itself, Matthew said, “missed the mark,” but, “it was a really interesting movie. Great script.”
“The funny part about it is that the production team was having a really hard time with Ryan,” Matthew said. “And this is young Ryan.” Boltneck was Reynolds’ fifth-ever movie.
“I had grown up in the industry so I knew my way around the set by that point,” the Boy Meets World star said. “I was dialed in. He wasn’t dialed in.” Reynolds “just wanted to kind of do his thing.” According to Matthew, the producers "were getting really upset" and told Reynolds he was doing a “bad Jim Carrey impersonation” and “this is not what we hired you to do.”
“You can’t impersonate someone, you gotta do your own thing,” Matthew remembered them saying. “And he got upset at that, and he was like, ‘I’m doing my thing.’ ” Matthew said he even remembered being in a meeting where the producers and director said of Reynolds, “He’s going nowhere!”
Matthew laughed at how wrong they were. “You never know in Hollywood, folks,” he said. He added that the producers were trying to make a “ ‘90s grunge, off-beat movie” but Reynolds perhaps wasn’t the right person for the job.
“I’m not even mad at Ryan in the sense that he actually stayed true to who he truly is authentically, because honestly, he was trying to Deadpool it,” Matthew said, in reference to Reynolds’ successful character and franchise.
“He’s obviously matured as a human being, but he was doing the same thing,” Matthew said. “That’s always been his schtick, his thing.”
Reynolds actually mentioned Boltneck, which was released straight to video, in a 2018 ad for Deadpool 2, having the character call it “a masterpiece.” The movie is streaming for free on Tubi.
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