In his new movie
The Nines, the queer writer behind Go and
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory cast one of the
hottest straight movie stars in Hollywood to play
himself. Then last month they ran off together to
Malawi. So what exactly is going on between these two? John
August talks to Ryan Reynolds
On his pregnancy radar:
John August:Probably a good strategy.
Ryan Reynolds: It’s the same thing where I
won’t ask a woman if she’s pregnant
unless the baby is crowning. Unless that baby is literally
dangling by an umbilical cord while she’s on a
hospital gurney.
She could have just had a big lunch.
We’ve all seen that happen, where you
say, “So, when are you due?” And
there’s just that blank stare. It just feels like a
tiny verbal car crash.
On Religion
But in real life, do you have to get your publicist
involved in things?
Yes, recently. [Laughs] I did an
interview also for this movie for another magazine.
The subject of religion came up, and I said some things
that might have been somewhat provocative for certain groups
in the United States of America. Now, I have no
concrete idea as to what the state of religion is or
what it should be, nor am I qualified to even
speculate on that, but I did nonetheless. I was driving home
and I thought, He asked some really good great
questions, especially that one about
religion—oh, shit. That’s when you
call your publicist and you say “Look, I might
have said, ‘Religion poisons everything good in
this world,’ uh…that might be a
problem.”
And now here you are doing it again.
I know! I’ll probably call her after you
and I finish this interview.
On Paparazzi
There’s this need to create narrative. They have
all these little snapshot images of this celebrity
with that celebrity, and it becomes a process of
creating an elaborate scenario that would explain why
she was with him on that day and another guy on a
different day. And why she would look unhappy
taking groceries out of her car.
Yeah, they’d never assume that
it’s because the paparazzi is taking a picture
and opening up their life with a jackhammer. They’re
taking 140 shots a minute, and then they choose the
one where you look like you’re frowning or a
little bit upset or a little bit anything. Suddenly that
becomes the story, which turns into “fact”
shortly afterwards. It’s crazy. It’s
stressful for the people who are under this microscope, and
it’s stressful for the people around them as well.
Because if you’re dating a girl, and
you’re photographed with another girl who happens to
be famous, and they’re cropping out the eight people
around you—suddenly you’re in hot water
for no reason at all.
On Outing
Hence the witch
hunt. That’s what frustrates me about some of the
celebrity blogs in particular. They’re so obsessed
with outing certain celebrities or punishing the
people they think should be out that it turns into
sort of this new McCarthyism.
If I were a gay
man, I’d like to believe that it would be my choice
if I were to publicize that or not.
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See John August's photo journal with Ryan Reynolds
in Malawi.