The Adam Project: The True Story and The Personal Story Of Ryan Reynolds And Shawn Levy That Inspired This Film
The second collaboration between actor and director is a science fiction film centered on the “classic” theme of time travel: but the focus is above all on the relationship between fathers and children, a private and painful matter for the two. When The Adam Project finally came out of a nearly ten-year “development hell” from Paramount to Netflix, Ryan Reynolds quickly accepted the proposal to take over from outgoing Tom Cruise. Behind the film by Shawn Levy, the second consecutive collaboration between the actor and the director after Free Guy, there is in fact a story too greedy and personal not to be told and the opportunity to come to terms with the past of him.
The Adam Project is based on an idea by TS Nowlin, a “spec script” that became a real script with the help of Jonathan Tropper, Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin. A feel-good movie on the difficult practical and emotional path of fatherhood “disguised” as a sci-fi dramedy. At the center of the tale, which bounces back and forth in time between 2018, 2022 and 2050, is a pilot willing to meet his own child (Walker Scobell), marked as the mother (Jennifer Garner) since the death of the scientist father (Mark Ruffalo), to save his wife (Zoe Saldaña) and the whole world from the evil plans of a “philanthropist” (Catherine Keener).
The True Story Of Ryan Reynolds Behind The Adam Project
Why is The Adam Project, streaming on the platform March 11, such a personal and “concrete” matter for Ryan Reynolds? The Canadian actor admits bluntly that “this story is about me”. Louis, Adam’s dad in the film, dies when he is still small. Ryan lost his father in 2015, aged 74, but after a long period of tremendous suffering.
James Chester Reynolds is an agent of GRC, the “Mounties”: the Canadian mounted police. After leaving his policing career, he becomes a food wholesaler. He is a safer job to raise his four children without too many problems. On the other hand, Jim is a person of few words: he works hard to bring bread to the table, he works hard, but when he comes home he doesn’t spend a lot of time with his boys. He is a man of other times. His quiet life is suddenly turned upside down in 1995, when Ryan is 19: a doctor diagnoses Jim with Parkinson’s disease.
The first symptoms are the usual ones of the disease: he does not move an arm well, he has difficulty writing and expressing himself, sometimes he has a tremor in the whole body. Her whole world is sucked into a black hole. The “strange” aspect, as the actor called it in an interview with Today, is that the father never explicitly talks about Parkinson’s with his children. “He belongs to a rather proud generation – Explains Reynolds – and he hardly ever talks about it: he will have said it openly yes and not a couple of times”.
The father’s illness ends up uniting the rest of the family: the Reynolds brothers huddle around their mother. Ryan met Michael J. Fox (speaking of “back to the future”) and in 2008 he joined the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. He even participates in the New York marathon (without being a runner) to support and promote research. In an editorial that appeared on the Huffington Post blog, Reynolds writes that he is aware of the suffering of those with Parkinson’s.
I saw my father – a strong and proud person who successfully raised four probably crazy children – slowly, cruelly stripped of his independence. His golden years stolen from him without an explanation. He sucks. Seeing my father suffer all this time has fueled my need to step forward.
Confronting himself in the past every day, what he was yesterday: this is what happens to Adam in The Adam Project and what happens to people affected by Parkinson’s. “They fight a battle in their own body – writes the actor – and their fight, unlike any marathon, does not end in a puddle of vomit as soon as they leave the Tavern on the Green waiting for an ambulance. after day, fighting in silence in the most personal of their battles.”
When Reynolds and wife Blake Lively had their first child in 2014, they named him James, just like their grandfather. A touching image of Ryan and Jim together is still on social media. The fathers of the third millennium are those who want to be always present, available and involved in the life of their children along the entire path of growth. The Adam Project also has a special meaning for Levy: the director has experienced contrasting relationships with his parents and throughout his career he has always wanted to try to give himself a second chance to bond, to solve the burdens of the past that he carries in heart.
Shawn Levy’s “Difficult” Childhood
Today the father of four daughters, the Canadian director revealed that he was raised in a dysfunctional family. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly at the time of the release of This Is Where I Leave You , Levy talks openly about hard times his loved ones have been through because of the “struggles my mother was going through. “What saved him was the deep bond with the five brothers. They were always present” in the darkest moments of my childhood and adolescence” and convinced him to reconcile with his parents.
Everyone makes mistakes: the important thing is to recognize it and take advantage of the time we have available to repair them. For Levy “it is difficult to spend time with your siblings and your parents because you are imprisoned in the belief they have of you, which is different from the identity you built as an adult. But these connections have a strong redeeming power.”
The relationship between father and son is the heart of The Adam Project. “The traumas and challenges of my childhood – Levy recalls in an interview with Nerdist – soon taught me how important it is to make peace with those struggles. And to make peace with that anger and resentments that accumulate over the years”. Shawn and Ryan were a bit like little Adam lost, lonely and struggling with a less than ideal childhood, before growing up and finally being able to forgive their parents for their imperfections. Bringing their experiences and feelings into this film wasn’t just cathartic. It was a way to go back and finally say what they never said.
