CANNES — Ryan Reynolds’ parenting mistakes are the key to his success.
The movie star-turned-marketing maven joked during his “Creativity at the Pace of Culture” discussion in Journal House Tuesday morning that raising his “wild” three daughters taught him the most.
“I am a parent of three girls. They are wild. I think they have rabies sometimes,” he joked, making the Cannes Lions laugh out of the crowd.
“I’m like any parent – I’ll have a moment where I’m just pretty. It’s not so much what you do in the moment that’s interesting, it’s what you do next.”
Reynolds, 45, said his “brutal mistakes” have given him more inspiration and insight than any of his “successes” in both Hollywood and marketing.
“I used to say to my kids, ‘Don’t waste your mistakes,'” he said. “When you make mistakes, it’s easy to get a little absorbed in shame and the idea that you’ve done something wrong, but you also need to look at it critically and use it as a stepping stone to learn something profound. †
The ‘Free Guy’ star joked that his ‘parenting mistakes’ are among his favorites, as are his ‘father’s’.
“He made a lot of mistakes,” he joked. “For some I am grateful.”
Reynolds and his wife Blake Lively share daughters James (7), Inez (5) and Betty (2). He revealed that he takes his daughters to school every morning and joked that it was a “tent circle of hell.”
Given the extenuating circumstances for his family and that of his family, Reynolds was triggered by commercials mentioning “these unprecedented times” and he knew his company, MNTN, had to change.
“No f–king s–t, a–hole,” he joked. “My children have not been to school for five months. I’m losing my damn mind! Of course these are unprecedented times.
“You lose people very easily that way,” he said of that marketing tactic.