Don’t be fooled. Ryan Reynolds might look confident, but deep down he’s been dealing with longtime anxiety.

“I have anxiety. I’ve always had anxiety,” he said to The New York Times. “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.”

He adds that in his early 20s he went through a “real unhinged phase,” admitting he self-medicated to ease his anxiety. “I was partying and just trying to make myself vanish in some way.”

He said he still gets wracked by dread and nausea before interviews and talk show appearances. “When there’s built-in expectation,” he says, “your brain always processes that as danger.”

“When the curtain opens, I turn on this knucklehead, and he kind of takes over and goes away again once I walk off set,” he explains. “That’s that great self-defense mechanism. I figure if you’re going to jump off a cliff, you might as well fly.”