Ryan Reynolds opens up about raising daughters with Blake Lively: ‘Blake runs the show’

Ryan Reynolds is willing to admit that Blake Lively keeps their household running smoothly. Ryan and Blake have been married since 2012 and share three daughters: seven-year-old James, five-year-old Inez, and two-year-old Betty. In recent years, the Deadpool actor has been very open about the joys of becoming a “girl dad.” 

Still, Ryan insists that he couldn’t be the father he is today without Lively. “Blake runs the show. I would kind of really phone things in if it wasn’t for her. She has higher standards,” he tells David Letterman in a new teaser for the host’s Netflix series, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. For example, he credits Blake for his newfound skills in the kitchen, which he demonstrated for Letterman. “Blake, full disclosure, really showed me how to do all this,” Reynolds says.

When Letterman asks Ryan if he’d feel “anxiety” if Blake were to leave for an extended period of time to, let’s say, visited her family, the actor answers with his signature sense of humor. “I would, first off, never let her go visit her family,” he jokes in the clip, adding, “No, yeah, that is illegal. That’s kidnapping.”

More seriously, Ryan says that he would find prolonged alone time with his daughters “pretty exciting at first” but says “division of labor is very important” when you’re raising three girls.

All this to say, Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively take parenting their daughters together very seriously. “I just try to be as present as possible,” Reynolds told Access Hollywood in November 2020. “We don’t split up. Like, I shoot movies and my wife shoots movies and we go travel all over the place, and we just all go together. I think that’s been the best part of it is that we really don’t spend a lot of time apart. I get to spend a lot of time with my girls.”

In October 2021, the actor even announced a short break from acting to focus on parenting. “We all want to be together during this time,” he told People. “Our kids are still quite young, and I don’t want to miss it.”

This article first appeared on Glamour.com.