“I have three daughters at home and part of my job as a parent is to model behaviors and model what it’s like to be sad and model what it’s like to be anxious or angry,” the Proposal star, 44, told Entertainment Tonight on Saturday, June 5. “That there’s space for all these things.”

The Canada native shares daughters James, 6, Inez, 4, and Betty, 19 months, with wife Blake Lively. The pair married in 2012 after a year of dating.

“The home that I grew [up] in, that wasn’t modeled for me really,” the Deadpool actor continued. “And that’s not to say that my parents were neglectful, but they come from a different generation.”

The Two Guys and a Girl alum said that he wants his own openness to serve as an example at home now that he’s a parent himself.

“A lot of it is just wanting to model certain things for my own kids and model things for anyone who might need to hear it,” he explained. “Other people feel like, ‘Oh, he’s feeling that and so am I.’ And even though we might be in two completely different fields or we might have two completely different lives, it connects us in a way,”

For Mental Health Awareness Month, Reynolds discussed his battle with anxiety in an Instagram post shared on May 26.

“One of the reasons I’m posting this so late is I overschedule myself and important things slip,” he wrote. “And one of the reasons I overschedule myself is my lifelong pal, anxiety. I know I’m not alone and more importantly, to all those like me who overschedule, overthink, overwork, over-worry and over-everything, please know you’re not alone.”

He added that he hoped his message inspired his followers to be more open about their own mental health struggles. “We don’t talk enough about mental health and don’t do enough to destigmatize talking about it,” the Pokémon Detective Pikachu star continued. “But, as with this post, better late than never, I hope.”

Though he’s known for his friendly persona and ribbing Lively, 33, via social media, Reynolds has said that he experiences feelings of nausea and fear whenever he does a talk-show appearance.

“I have anxiety, I’ve always had anxiety,” he told The New York Times in 2018. “Both in the lighthearted ‘I’m anxious about this’ kind of thing, and I’ve been to the depths of the darker end of the spectrum, which is not fun.”

This story originally appeared on: US Magazine - Author:Eliza Thompson