Ryan Reynolds's new movie is an unusual one.
Buried tells the story of a contractor buried alive in Iraq. Blake Lively, who appears with Reynolds in the superhero film he is now making, Green Lantern, describes the mood before a Buried screening that had been set up for the Green Lantern cast and crew in New Orleans. What they already knew gave them some trepidation. The whole of Buried consists of footage of the buried man—Reynolds—in his coffin. The whole film. The camera never once leaves his enclosure. How could that work, or be worthwhile, or even tolerable? Reynolds himself had much the same reaction when he was first told about the script: "I just thought, There's no possible way that could be any good."
"Everybody loved Ryan, and they all wanted to go and support the movie," says Lively, "but they all thought, 'Okay, this will be interesting to see how this turns out.' As much as I like Ryan, I thought, 'I don't think I can watch anybody in a box for an hour and a half.'"
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"I'm ready now," Reynolds concedes. His remarkable torso was first developed during rehearsals for Blade: Trinity, the unsatisfying continuation of Wesley Snipes's vampire series. "Everything went so horribly wrong on that set," he remembers, though he still takes some pride in the film's most celebrated linguistic invention ("you cock-juggling thunder[foo foo]"). At least Blade: Trinity gave him the body. He worked out for six months beforehand. "It was like a project. I just did everything they told me to."
Right now he has that body again. Reynolds is at pains to point out that this isn't his natural, or permanent, way of being, just something he is currently doing for the third time, for Green Lantern, after Blade: Trinity and The Proposal. (Precisely why a New York publishing assistant—his character in The Proposal—should have, or need, this level of muscular definition is unclear, other than that he is the star of a movie that will often find him partially or fully unclothed in Sandra Bullock's company.) "It was a strange sort of sleight-of-hand trick I learned—I could do it again if I needed to and get there faster if I needed to."
On the Green Lantern set, I watch him eat his usual plate of steamed chicken, salmon, broccoli, carrots, and rice. On the kitchen counter of the house he rents in New Orleans is a huge jar of a white powder called Isolyze, primarily whey protein. Wherever he is, he snacks on these orange bars called Zero Impact Pumpkin Supremes—"sort of like a pumpkin made out of cinder block," he quips. It takes his co-star to spell out the full grim reality of his commitment. "If you saw him coming to work at five in the morning, when I could barely open my eyes and he'd been up for two hours in the gym…," says Lively. "If everyone had that discipline, they, too, could have abs of steel."
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The secret truth of superhero movies is this: With great power comes great indignity. Ryan Reynolds is the Green Lantern. In the DC comic books, and eventually on-screen, this means that he is a human member of an intergalactic police force, someone who wears a ring that confers on him many magical abilities. In reality, this means working relentlessly from January until August in New Orleans, spending much of his time in a kind of thin gray one-piece bodysuit. It's an absurd outfit—slinky, drab, and emasculating. The gray is covered in places by black stripes and white circles and squares, as though designed by a color-blind Aborigine. None of this will be seen in the movie—the uniform is a motion-capture suit, over which the Green Lantern's costume will be digitally layered in postproduction—but it is what Reynolds has to live with, and within, for all these months. "My fantasy dancing jammies," he says. "Kind of ridiculous, I know." And it feels worse than it looks. "It's made of actual woven misery," he says. "Whatever material they've used, they've managed to make it the most heat-conducting substance known to man. I literally begged them to just put me in a nonbreathable rubber unitard." New Orleans has been sweltering. He describes a recent location: "It was like shooting an entire movie inside Alec Baldwin."
This afternoon a newly empowered Green Lantern meets two aliens who will train him in his new powers and role. Everything is shot against a blue screen with orange letters dotted over it. One of the aliens is played by a man on stilts. Reynolds cowers on the ground in his gray dotted one-piece as the man on stilts leers toward him.
"You smell funny," the would-be alien tells him.
"You smell," the Green Lantern improvises, "like a bag of assholes."
They have been in New Orleans a long time.
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