UPDATE: Updates were made to this post following edits made in Elle.com’s original story.
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Ryan Phillippe might have more in common with Sebastian Valmont than we thought! The Cruel Intentions alum admitted to Elle.com he suffers from depression.
While chatting with the magazine’s site about his new role in ABC’s miniseries Secrets and Lies, the actor revealed he connects to his character — a family man accused of murdering a young boy — because he’s “quietly tortured at times.”
“You know, depression has been a huge obstacle for me ever since I was a child,” Reese Witherspoon’s ex-husband admitted. “As you get older I think it decreases some, but I’m just innately kind of a sad person. I’m empathetic, and I take on the feelings of others and transpose myself into the position of others.”
“It can ruin your f—king life,” he added, admitting that if he could “un-feel” those feelings he would. “I’d prefer to suffer through the sadness than to be a complete moron with no feelings [though].”
The dad of three — he and Witherspoon share daughter Ava, 15, and son Deacon, 11, and he has a daughter named Kai with ex-girlfriend Alexis Knapp — does use his sadness in his favor, however. “I’m way funnier than people know me to be,” he told the mag. “And it’s a dark humor, like a gallows humor. I think that’s where, if you do carry any of that sadness or depression, your humor does tend to be a little darker than most people.”
Depression aside, Phillippe, 40, also dropped a major Cruel Intentions bomb — that Porsche he drives in the movie? It’s fake!
“Everyone was always like in love with that Porsche I drive, but it was actually a plastic shell on the crappiest…It was not a real Porsche,” he admitted. “It’s basically a prop.”
