There’s no denying that being the offspring of a celebrity certainly comes with its perks, but Ryan Phillippe has insisted there was no nepotism involved when his son was cast in the Prime Video series Motorheads.
Already recruited for the lead role of Logan Maddox in the coming-of-age drama, the 50-year-old revealed he was taken aback when the idea of tapping Deacon to play his character’s younger brother in flashbacks was broached.
“I was like, ‘Wow, OK,’” Ryan recently recalled to People magazine about his son with ex-wife Reese Witherspoon.
“I didn’t want to be an influence one way or the other, so I said, ‘Well, offer it to him, and see what he thinks.’ The whole time [in my head], I’m like, ‘Please do it. Please do it. I want you there with me.’ But I wanted it to be his own decision.”
With the 21-year-old currently studying music at New York University, Ryan has admitted that spending time together was selfishly one of the reasons he wanted Deacon to agree to the part. “I was thrilled because what that meant was he would come in and out throughout the production, and I would get to spend time with him,” he explained. “When your kids go off to college, it’s really unsettling. It really leaves a deficit, a hole in your life in some ways.
“Even though I go and visit him in New York, and we spend a lot of time with each other when we can, it’s different than when you’ve got them in your house every day,” Ryan added. “This experience offered me that opportunity again to live together for a week.”
While the bond between the father-son duo appears strong, with the pair happily posing for snaps together at the May 13 premiere of their new series, the same apparently can’t be said of Ryan’s relationship with daughter Ava.
The 25-year-old, who Ryan also shares with Witherspoon, hasn’t been seen publicly with her dad in over two years – with their last public sighting being in April 2023, when they attended the release party for Deacon’s debut album in West Hollywood.
Though Ryan recently maintained to Us Weekly that he’s “proud of all” his children – he also shares daughter Kai, 13, with ex Alexis Knapp – he continues to post frequently about Deacon on social media but hasn’t posted anything about Ava since 2018. Likewise, Ava last posted about her dad for Father’s Day in 2015 but has since deleted the post. In comparison, she posts regularly about her relationship with Witherspoon.
Despite Ryan once crediting his daughter with teaching him “what love truly is”, their relationship has reportedly been fraught for years. Insiders divulged that things started to fracture between the pair after the actor’s ex-girlfriend Elsie Hewitt accused Ryan of assault in a $1.6 million lawsuit.
“Things really soured in 2018 around the time he was accused of abuse by his ex,” an insider explained to Daily Mail in April. “Her issue with Ryan is his treatment of women, which she finds appalling.”
Hewitt, who is now in a relationship with comedian Pete Davidson, claimed in a legal filing at the time that Ryan had come to her Los Angeles home, where he threw her down the stairs before “kicking and striking” her.
She also claimed he used drugs, alcohol and steroids, which caused extreme mood swings.
Despite Ryan strenuously denying the allegations and emphasising his support for “women’s rights, feminism and advocacy” at the time – with the lawsuit settled out of court in 2019 for an undisclosed sum – the relationship between father and daughter reportedly hasn’t been the same since.
“She started to see him differently – he wasn’t this kind of hero who worshipped her any more,” a source recently told Woman’s Day. “She has girlfriends who’ve gone through terrible situations, some even worse, and she’s seen how much it can break someone. She has zero tolerance for it.”
