Ryan Reynolds Is So Happy He Doesn’t Have a Son, Hated Filming With Cats

Ryan Reynolds stopped by Live! With Kelly and Michael on Thursday morning to promote his new dark-comedy film, The Voices, and couldn’t stop smiling about being a new dad.

Even Kelly Ripa noted he smelled like baby powder. “That’s not gonna change anytime soon,” he said. “If I don’t get some sleep soon, I’ll change that to arsenic.”

Full of jokes (but still keeping his daughter’s name a well-kept secret), he noted of his firstborn child with wife Blake Lively, “I’m happily not getting any sleep — these days I just think of blinking as taking tiny little naps all day. It’s what you do — you’re up all night, and what’s weird is you’re happy about it, in a strange way. If anything else woke up every 45 minutes during the night, demanding to see my wife’s breast, you kill it. A baby, you’re like, ‘woo-hoo!’ ”

He added that he’s glad they had a daughter, because he likes his house relatively preserved. “I can say it now — I was terrified to have a boy. … Growing up, our house was just a wiffle house: It was full of holes … because we’re just animals, boys are animals. They’re psychotic. … When I was 7 years old, we were already drywalling before my dad got home. I’m not joking! We would spackle, drywall, paint, and he’d have no idea.”

Reynolds did admit that he finds himself falling into the cliches of fatherhood — except for one. “Everyone thinks their baby is a genius! People find it delightfully refreshing when I tell them, ‘My baby? Totally average. A hundred percent average.’ “

He not only stars in Marjane Satrapi‘s The Voices, but he also serves as the voice actor behind a handful of the talking animals in the film. An admitted dog lover, he said, “I have respect for [cats] the way you have respect for a sawed-off shotgun. Also, the cat did not like me. Dogs and I are in heaven together. I picked up Mr. Whiskers once, and it was like a Swiss Army knife and a throwing star combined —  claws everywhere, I was bleeding out of my arm, my chest, I don’t even know how it got the back of my leg! It was crazy.”

The Voices, also starring Jacki Weaver, Gemma Arterton and Anna Kendrick, hits theaters and VOD on Friday. Watch Reynolds’ appearance below.