‘I don’t care what my value is today’: teen dream Ryan Phillippe on co-parenting

Back in 2006, when Ryan Phillippe was 32, he flew to Costa Rica in the hope of escaping a media maelstrom. He and his wife of seven years, Reese Witherspoon, had announced they were separating, and the LA paparazzi, then at its peak madness, pursued him everywhere. So he left the country in search of anonymity. No such luck: when he landed, some people excitedly approached him.

“They said to me, ‘Excuse me, are you Justin Timberlake?’” Phillippe, now 48, recalls with a self-deprecating chuckle.

Phillippe is talking to me by video chat from his home in Los Angeles. With his blond curls and naughty satyr face, he looks remarkably unchanged from his 90s and 00s heyday, when films such as I Know What You Did Last Summer and Cruel Intentions turned him into a teen idol. He was more talented than that term suggests, which is why he has worked with Robert Altman (Gosford Park), Clint Eastwood (Flags of Our Fathers) and Ridley Scott (White Squall). But he certainly had the look that was popular back then, the blond babyface, as redolent of the late 90s as Kris Kristofferson’s beardy ruggedness is of the 1970s, or Chris Hemsworth’s chiselled Marvel appearance will be of this era. As well as Phillippe, there was Timberlake, most obviously, and Hayden Christensen, and he got cast as the dodgy seducer in Gosford Park after Jude Law – his English doppelganger – dropped out. Did it seem weird to be surrounded by so many lookalikes?

“Not really. Although there’s a great clip from Jay Leno’s Tonight Show [in 2001] when Reese was on and so were ‘NSync, and Justin talks about how he’s often mistaken for me. Then Reese says something like, ‘Well, I think Ryan’s much better looking,’” he grins. Yet just five years later, Witherspoon and Phillippe would split up, and instead of Timberlake talking hopefully about how he looked like Phillippe, Phillippe would be getting mistaken for Timberlake. The celebrity world is a cruel one. “This business is tough, man,” he says. “You really get beat up in a lot of ways.”

Back in the 2000s, it looked like Phillippe would tread a similar path to the one Kevin Bacon had the decade before. Unlike so many of his contemporaries – Freddie Prinze Jr, Selma Blair, Jennifer Love Hewitt – he was making that tricky transition from teen heartthrob to serious adult actor by parking his ego, working in ensemble films (Crash) and taking supporting roles (The Lincoln Lawyer). Bacon grasped early on that there’s no shame in playing the smaller role in a film of big names, and Phillippe got that, too. When I mention Gosford Park, he says: “I couldn’t believe who I was working with on that. Everyone except me and Bob Balaban were dames and knights, mavens and lords of the British cinema and theatre, and I had a full respect for that going in.”

But times changed: the parts got smaller and the films less consistent. “You go into any project with the hope that it will be good, and maybe a few of the films I’ve done have turned out pretty crappy,” he smiles. Today we’re talking because Phillippe is in Summit Fever, an independent film about a bunch of climbers in Chamonix, France. It’s an ensemble film, like Gosford Park, but this time Phillippe is by far the most famous person in it. Which is a less ideal situation, because it’s always better to be the small fish in an ocean than floundering in a puddle. But he’s good in it, and Summit Fever is very enjoyable if you like to watch people risking their lives on icy mountains for no obvious reason.

Phillippe signed on because he liked the script, he says, plus he wanted something to do during lockdown and quite fancied learning how to climb. “On an independent, there’s no money to fake it, so it’s all real. There was this ice climb that we did, and there were times when I looked down and it was a sheer drop beneath me. Your life is in the hands of the guide who’s teaching you and it was like, ‘Yeah, I can’t believe I’m doing this,’” he says.

Does he mind that he’s in a relatively small supporting role? “You know, the leads are always there. But supporting roles are kind of fun. It’s less pressure.”

Phillippe is a very easygoing conversationalist, charming and chatty. Unlike most celebrities, who focus purely on what they’re promoting, he is very happy to reminisce about the old days, such as recalling his friendship with Altman on Gosford Park:

“I was about 25 years old and had just had Ava [his daughter with Witherspoon], but…