- My clone is a good dad.
- Or you're funnier than your clone.
- Or yes, or I'm funnier than my clone.
- What if you're the clone?
- Ha ha!
- Hi, I'm Ryan Reynolds.
- I'm also Ryan Reynolds.
- Strange.
- But that could be Rob McElhenney.
- It is.
- Pronounced Rob.
- And today we're going to let Elle ask us anything.
- But before we get started,
make sure to check out "Welcome to Wrexham,"
FX, Hulu, Disney Plus.
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Greatest athlete of all time?
Pele's up there. - Yeah.
- I always hate this argument
because it's like, these are all these different sports.
- 'Cause if you look at like a decathlete,
you say, well, they can do so many different things.
But who, sometimes I think if you could plug,
like what's the perfect athleticism where you could,
and sport, where you can plug into various sports?
'Cause I find that any of my friends
who were professional athletes,
they were always good at every sport
and then they just had to pick a lane.
But I feel like if you took somebody like Kobe Bryant,
or somebody like Michael Jordan,
those guys were so fast, so quick, so big, and so athletic
that they could probably do anything.
So I would say it would probably be
a professional basketball player.
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Everything, but play is a tough word.
Tried to play would be the phrasing.
I tried to play basketball, football, hockey, soccer,
wrestling, rowing, boxing.
I didn't really make it through any season of anything.
Jujitsu, karate- - Jesus Christ.
- It was really sad, (chuckles) it was really sad.
It's so lame to say my children, but, I mean-
- Oh, I thought you were gonna say nude hang gliding.
(Rob laughs)
- Well, wow, have you done that?
- Always, please, is there a way to do it clothed?
Come on. - Wow.
See, I'd love to- - Get (bleep) outta town.
Yeah, definitely my family.
I mean, we're not monsters.
- Yeah.
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- We don't want to get stabbed when we go to the UK
so we call it football. - Always football.
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My first business venture was a paper route.
I had a paper route.
You know what a paper route taught me though?
It taught me accountability.
I also worked at a grocery store called Safeway,
I drove a forklift
and I worked the midnight to 8:00 AM shift and I loved it
because it was a great preparation for Hollywood.
You know, I'm pretty much on time, I'm pretty accountable,
and I look at those experiences as formative for me.
It was, you know, if you're late to jobs like that,
you're fired.
Show business there's a lot more leeway
in that sort of thing, but I like
that it kind of ingrained accountability in me really early.
- When I was 12 I had a paper route as well and I remember,
it was one of those papers that nobody wanted.
It was a weekly that would just arrive.
And then we were instructed to go once a month
and collect for a paper that nobody wanted.
And I realized very early on the first time that I went
that I would get lots of doors slammed in my face,
so then I pivoted from there,
the next month I went back and I realized that
I would tell the people if you just pay me $2
I'll stop throwing the newspaper on your curb
and then you never have to throw it out,
I'll just throw it out.
So I would take the newspapers, I would throw them out,
then I would go collect.
Which now I'm realizing is kind of like what gangsters do.
- And that guy would go on to create
600 popular television shows.
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Oh wow, definitely the crippling anxiety.
That has been a daily meal.
The best part I think is, I mean, when they win,
I don't know that there's any better feeling on earth.
When they lose, that hurts.
- For me it's making new friends,
making new connections in the community,
getting to spend a lot more time with Ryan, truly,
it's been an amazing experience
and we forged so many new relationships because of it.
- That's true.
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I mean, as soon as we started this thing
I felt instantly comfortable.
My daughter said the other day, she said,
daddy Rob looks more like your brother than your brothers.
I was like, yeah, we do kind of seem like we're brothers,
a little bit, so it just worked, you know,
it was just one of those things where it's a bit of,
you know, it's a bit of luck, but a lot of just,
you know, mutually agreeable personality traits, I suppose.
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- That I have a deeper well of anxiety
than I thought that I had.
And it comes out every Saturday morning
and every Tuesday afternoon.
My abject fear, every time I go into a football match
is unlike any other sport.
I think it's just very specific to this particular sport
where anything can happen at any given moment.
Terrifying.
- For me it's probably my, just, you know,
objectively obscene obsession with football now.
I was shocked that I, I went into this this whole deal
really with no real understanding of the sport,
not a huge, I've never watched, you know,
I didn't watch a lot of professional sports,
but I've never really watched
a football game in its entirety
and now I'm obsessed with Wrexam AFC
but also obsessed with the sport in general.
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Liver, lung, and heart?
- Yeah, was gonna say, water,
shelter. - Shelter's nice.
Three things in the hyperbolic sense
that we cannot live without.
Boy, I'm a bit of a sugar junkie
so chocolate for me is like a- - Really?
- Yeah, I'm kind of obsessed with, yeah.
- See, I just learned something.
- I mean, I am kind of a,
I know that's sort of ridiculous to say
I'm a little obsessed with my own family,
I love being at home
with my wife and my kids and my daughters.
So that's a big one for me.
I think that can cover the last two, really.
(Rob laughs)
- I'm gonna get killed if I don't say my children
and my wife and my dogs and cats.
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- I would say Wrexham.
I think the Wrexham project is the biggest business risk
because you have so much more to lose than win.
- It's a tremendous responsibility
because it's not the kind of thing where,
oh, if it fails, then we just shutter the shop
and go into bankruptcy and settle out of court.
I mean, it's the kind of thing
where there's such an emotional component to this
and it's such a tremendous responsibility
that I I think that that's what makes it so dangerous.
- Yeah, and we're also, you know,
really kind of tinkering and, you know,
helping motivate the destiny
for the third oldest football club on the planet
that play in the oldest international stadium on the planet.
I mean, that's a lot of pressure,
so that's certainly a factor.
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- I love that everyone sings, everybody sings.
They're just, they're a singing country
and it's really quite beautiful.
- I heard Rob actually once say that the Welsh are,
I know you were paraphrasing from somebody else,
but that the Welsh are born with the the fist of a fighter
and the heart of a poet,
and I thought that that was really beautiful,
and I think that that's pretty true.
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- Well, we always knew from the beginning
that we wanted to find a club
whose community treated it with the respect that it deserved
and was the beating heart of the town.
And once we identified,
we actually found a few clubs like that,
but nobody like Wrexham.
And once we identified them and we realized that we had
a tremendous amount of responsibility
that we had to to take on,
and if we don't make sure that we are running
every decision we make through the lens of,
is this what's best for the community,
for a for long term success then we fail.
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The first major splurge I ever had was in New York City.
I booked like a few commercials
and I was working at a restaurant at the time
and the commercials paid me a good chunk of money
and I had never owned a car before,
and have owning a car in New York City
is the dumbest thing you can possibly do,
but I'had never owned a car-
- Yeah, now you're paying rent twice.
- It's so stupid.
But I thought, well, I want to own a car,
I finally have money, not a new car but a used car,
and there was this minivan
that was always parked outside of my house
and there was a sign on it that said for sale, $900.
And I thought, man, I finally have $900 to spare
and eventually that's gonna run out
so I just gotta spend it as quickly as possible.
And I bought this minivan
and it was the greatest feeling of my life,
'cause it was the first time
that I could own something of like real value.
- Mine was a clone.
You know, 'cause every celebrity needs
emergency harvest able organs, in case,
you know in case something happens.
Mine's not as grounded as yours, but yeah, that's fine.
To each his own
- Can we all get access to the clone or is it just for you?
- What do you wanna do to the clone, Rob?
- I'd like to take some of your organs,
I feel like your organs-
- Robs like, I wanna punch the clone, right.
I wanna beat the living shit out of your clone.
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- Remember all the sports I was talking about playing?
or trying to play, that was a time
where I felt like an underdog.
- Not in like the sociopolitical context,
but I would say that, you know,
spending 10 years trying to get Deadpool made,
I felt like that at some point
you start to feel a little bit like an underdog
after 10 years of no.
Yeah.
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Wow, ooh, I don't know.
That I'm a good dad.
- Yeah. - Or my clone is a good dad.
He's great.
- Or you're funnier than your clone.
- Or yes, or I'm funnier than my clone.
- That'd be good.
What if your clone was funnier than you?
- What if he wasn't?
- What if you're the clone?
- Ha ha! - (bleep)
- Thank you so much for hanging out with us and Elle today.
- Make sure to check out "Welcome to Wrexham."
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