While speaking with school student chief Derek Monias of Sandy Lake First Nation at Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School, Reynolds talked a bit about his career path and revealed that a passion for acting isn’t what initially drove him to move to Los Angeles, California. Reynolds said that his early acting gigs didn’t lead to much fame, so as a teenager, he went to school and worked at a grocery store. But even before his first few acting jobs, Reynolds had a completely different passion: improv comedy. He then said, “When I turned 18, I got back into improv comedy, and that’s why I moved to Los Angeles, to see if I could join a group called The Ground Wings, which is a really famous improv comedy group in Los Angeles.” “So that was my main goal for going down here. It wasn’t to work in films; it was to be on stage.” The actor’s comedic timing was evident in the interview as he continued to joke around and make everyone laugh. Reynolds also spoke with Monias about many other topics throughout the interview, including the upcoming Deadpool film, his love of sports, and his work helping Indigenous communities. Monias brought up how Reynolds and his wife, Blake Lively, donated $500,000 to the Canadian charity Water First Education & Training Inc., which supports bringing clean and safe water to Indigenous communities, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter. The high school student then asked the actor about anything else he thought “could be done to get the government to take real action.” Reynolds mentioned how many First Nations and Indigenous communities don’t have clean drinking water while big cities in Canada do before saying that, if the government took action, “That problem, I feel like would be solved pretty quickly, so I think there’s a level of inequity and injustice that this hasn’t been a priority, I mean Priority 1, for not just the federal government, but any civilized community.” While he didn’t have a clear answer for Monias, the 46-year-old said that he thinks that as more people become aware of the issue, more will be done to help those in need.
