When Christopher Reeve tells you you're going outside and you're going to learn how to ride a bike, that's what you're doing.
What is something about your wedding day you wish you could tell your mom and dad?
So much.
I wish I could tell them the minute-by-minute breakdown.
Have you found yourself?
I don't know if I ever fully will.
Hi, I'm Michael Sebastian, editor-in-chief of Esquire.
Today I'm joined by an award-winning journalist who's on Good Morning America and ABC World News Tonight.
He's also the son of Christopher and Dana Reeve, and through his work has carried on their legacy.
Please welcome Will Reeve.
Will, thanks for being here.
I think that you actually have the distinction of being the first father-son to do what I've learned.
In 2003, your dad did one of these interviews.
And in fact, I have the issue right here.
No way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jack Nicholson on the cover.
This was the January 2004.
How cool.
And there he is right there.
That's my.
Yeah.
That was the fancy living room.
Oh, we shat him in the fancy later on?
Yeah, where we would receive guests.
This is our gift to you, the issue on what your dad is in.
I love it.
I will cherish this.
Thank you so much.
One of the things he said in that interview was never accept ultimatums, conventional wisdom or absolutes, which is pretty good.
No ultimatums.
Yeah, no ultimatums, right.
Where I want to start is to put you on the spot right away.
What is your favorite Superman movie?
Superman 1.
Superman 1, yeah?
Okay, how come?
No, I'm mostly kidding.
That was the one that I think my dad was proudest of, the first and second Superman.
The first one that he was in changed his life and changed movies in many ways as well.
Believe a man could fly.
It was a totally new frontier.
And that's due in large part to the director, Dick Donner, and my dad, who brought such a truth and groundedness to this otherwise somewhat hard to believe character comic book figure.
So my dad was always proud of that, although he never identified himself as Superman.
He sort of left that to other people, whether he wanted it or not.
And so that's sort of the one that I would have ever watched.
But it wasn't like when we were sitting at home, my dad was making me sit down and watch his own movies.
We were watching sports or the news or cartoons or whatever I was into.
But that one, I think, is great.
And it's a treat to go back and I watch it through the son's eyes, seeing oh, there was my dad when he was.
He shot it when he was like 24.
That's a good, that's a solid answer, you know?
So you are an ABC News correspondent.
You're on Good Morning America.
You're on World News Tonight.
I want to ask you about why you got into journalism because, you know, when I watched Superman, the documentary about your dad, one thing that struck me is that, you know, after his accident, one of the darkest moments in your life I'm sure you had to face your family, had to face the media.
You know, there was flash bulbs going off.
It's in every newspaper.
They have to give press conferences and so on.
It felt really invasive in a way.
And yet now you're a journalist.
Yeah.
What made you decide to become a journalist?
Well, it's a two-part answer, I think.
The reason that I wanted to do it is because it lights so many fires for me.
Journalism and the job that I get to do every day for ABC News covers so many of my passions and interests, and I would like to thank strengths.
I am a decent communicator, although you can be the judge of that.
I'm a decent writer.
You could also be the judge of that if you wanted.
I could send you a sample.
I'm curious about people.
And I grew up in a house where it was very important to give a voice to the voiceless.
And that's the work that I love to do.
Most is telling other people's stories and getting to get out into the world and see what's really going on.
But even prior to that, when my dad got injured, I was so young, but there was so much media attention around that.
But then my dad realized that he had this power to be the face of spinal cord injury, to be an advocate for so many millions of people facing this terrible circumstance.
So he invited the world in, in a way, to watch him on his journey.
And that's what led to him and my mom as his primary caregiver and life partner, led them to be the inspiration for so many people.
I think it also gave me a confidence and a power to exercise empathy.
Now that I'm in this job, I have to sometimes ask uncomfortable questions of people on their worst day, or I'm asking them to relive their hardest or darkest moments, or have to make a phone call to someone who definitely doesn't want to pick up the phone from a journalist or from a news outlet.
But I have been on the receiving end of those.
And so I understand, I think, a little bit of what they may be going through.
And I try to bring that first.
I show up as a human first to my job and then as a professional after that.
Good answer.
It's the truth.
Is there a piece of advice that a journalist gave you at some point in your career that you still think about?
One of the best and first pieces of advice was say yes.
Just you don't know what's on the other side of yes.
No is a brick wall.
But if you say yes, it could be the best experience and opportunity of your life, or it could lead you down a dead end.
But you don't know until you say yes.
Until you say yes to that assignment, you say yes to that trip, you say yes to the grunt work that nobody else wants to do.
And I tried to do that as a 20-year-old kid interning at ABC News, not knowing at all what to do or how to be.
I just was figuring it out as I went.
But I realized once you said yes, you got asked to do more things.
That was piece number one.
And then it was be reliable show up on time, be where you say you were going to be, do what you say you were going to do.
That's work and life advice.
And then be kind.
Kindness gets you way further in life and at work than anything else.
So long answer, but those are the three concurrent pieces of advice that I don't think you could have one without the other.
Yeah, yeah.
We both work in the media and right now the public has a very low opinion, or at least they don't trust us as much as they have in the past.
Why do you think that is?
I think there's just a fractured society that we're living in right now.
It used to be the three networks, right, on television.
If you wanted the news, you had a finite number of places to go.
And now, for many great reasons and with many great outcomes, you can get whatever news you want from basically wherever you want.
But then, when everything shatters into this kaleidoscopic viewpoint, everyone can see what they want to see from the angle they want to see it at.
And I think that that just erodes trust over time.
And then you have actors on every side of that crazy kaleidoscope to continue the metaphor who are pushing their views and their preferences and their opinions and trying to work toward their ends.
And I think it just gets all confused.
And the legacy media, as it were, then is forced to adapt and i think it in many ways we have and in many ways there's still great work to be done.
Is there a story that you've done that that you couldn't shake after you after you reported it?
There are many.
The first wildfire i did i had never.
I grew up on the east coast.
We don't really have wildfires.
I was new at abc.
I'd been there less than a year and i got sent to a wildfire in wine country, California.
The way fire works is unpredictable, and we were in a safe space and then all of a sudden, the fire.
The wind switched and the fire was behind everybody, so we were more exposed than the firefighters.
I had never seen a wildfire before, and there I was, surrounded by it, having to talk on television about it in about three minutes.
And I'm like how have I, what life choices have I made to end up that I'm past the front lines of the firefighters?
So that stuck with me in a sense that I, that was the first time that I had felt fear.
And then another that I think of off the top of my head Johnny and Matthew Goudreau.
They were hockey playing brothers.
Johnny was in the NHL, tragically died in an accident on the weekend of their sister's wedding.
And I am the same age as Johnny Goudreau.
I grew up loving hockey, sports in general, and their story just really stuck with me.
Like, man, they're in the prime of their lives.
They have these wives and babies and then it's just cut so short in such a tragic, senseless moment.
And I had the privilege and the responsibility to interview their widows together for the first time on television.
And maybe it's because we're all about the same age.
Maybe it's because I was heading into my own marriage and I had started to think about starting a family and thinking about losing my own parents or whatever other loss that I've suffered.
It hit me in such a profound way that sticks with me.
Their strength, the pain that they were in, but the fact that they were marching forward for their children.
I recognized something from my own life in them.
And I found it beautiful and heartbreaking and that sticks with me and I think has made me hopefully even 1 a better, more empathetic person, knowing what people go through like that.
You seem to be drawn to stories about resilience.
Is that a conscious choice or is that just kind of innate?
I don't know.
I haven't really thought about it, so I guess it's not a conscious choice.
I feel like I do my best work when I'm connecting with my subject on a human level.
And I know resilience, and I know grief, and I know triumph over adversity.
And when I find people going through a similar experience, whatever stage they're on in that journey, I feel like that's place I can connect.
And I also think that telling people's stories is a privilege and a duty and a responsibility that I take very seriously.
And I think that I have life experience telling my own story.
So I feel like a good steward of theirs.
So I suppose I'm drawn to it in that way.
Yeah.
A different kind of resilience.
You had a very memorable live TV moment during the pandemic where you weren't wearing pants.
That's right.
But the companies do say they will scale up the program.
Okay, we're a few years out from that now.
How do you look at that?
We're six years out from that now.
It was amusing then and still is.
I always say I was glad I was the first one to do it, because if you're the second third fifth, then you're just sloppy.
If one guy already got caught, then what are you doing?
But it was a time where we were all quarantined in our various homes.
Yeah, and all of us, i know for a fact, yeah would put on a you know, a jacket and tie and shirt like that and then go in sweats or shorts or whatever.
And this was in the springtime, and so my routine was i would go down and do gma on my phone with a ring light around me and a headphone in, and then I would take off the top and put a t-shirt on and go for a run.
It was nice to have a grounding routine in such an uncertain, ungrounded time.
And that day the framing was just a little bit off and they switched from a close-up on me to a two-shot of me and the anchors back at the studio.
And I was wearing gym shorts.
People think I was wearing underwear.
I just want to correct for the record for time immemorial.
It was Nike running shorts that I still own because they're good shorts.
Yeah.
The part of me that was embarrassed was I take my job very seriously.
I don't take myself particularly seriously.
And I didn't want anyone who I worked with or for to think that I was slacking off on the job or that I didn't care, that I was sloppy.
And once I knew that my bosses were like buddy, we're all doing the same thing on our various zooms and like there's a lot more serious stuff to worry about.
Right now it's like all right cool, glad you find it funny, like I do, because it was silly.
Um okay, I want to go uh way back uh, talk about your childhood, and I want to start with with um, a question about your mom.
What, what's the biggest lesson you learned from her?
Oh, we could do the whole thing on her.
Dana Reeve was a singular figure in world history.
She was the best.
If I could distill her into one lesson, compassion can bring you really far.
She was the most compassionate person that I had ever encountered until I met my wife.
The way that my mom, at age 33 34, the age that I am now was thrown into this great unknown of the love of her life, her own superhero in a way, getting paralyzed and unable to breathe on his own, unable to move, this whole terrifying new chapter of her life.
But she had so much compassion for him, for me, for humanity, that she was able to understand what my dad needed and take care of him.
And understand what I needed as a son a young son and Take care of me.
She understood what our family needed as a unit.
Yeah, and she would always Not even tell me more than just she would show me through her own actions of.
When you have the power of, or the platform or the privilege to be able to help other people, to lend a hand, to give a voice to the voiceless whatever you want to call it you have a moral obligation to do so.
And it actually is more fulfilling for you.
You have to give more than you take.
I learned that from her, and it started with her compassion.
There's a number of things that you have experienced unlike many other people, but maybe the most singular is that your dad was Superman.
Yeah.
What do you learn from that?
I don't know.
I think I learned it retroactively because in the moment, He didn't see himself as Superman.
That was just a role that he played and became known for.
He saw himself as Chris.
He was a classically trained pianist.
He spoke multiple languages.
He could fly airplanes and sailboats and ski double black diamonds.
He was a good tennis player.
He had such an interesting and full life.
That had nothing to do with the fact that people knew him as Superman.
So he certainly didn't see himself that way.
So he never presented himself to our family as Superman.
He was just dad.
And so I didn't see him as Superman because he played it.
I saw him as Superman because he was my dad and I had a great relationship with him.
So he was my hero, my best friend.
That's, I guess.
What I learned is that it ultimately doesn't really matter, but you can make that fame or that platform that fame brings you matter if you apply it.
Your parents were both obviously public figures, but they lived very private lives.
What did you learn from that?
That everyone's just a person.
That's all.
And that it's more fun to be able to do what you want.
And what they wanted to do was go sailing and skiing and ride bikes around town.
And by the way, I was born after my dad's peak of Superman-ness, right?
Yeah.
I'm sure that when he was in his late 20s, early 30s, living between London and New York and gallivanting around, Being famous was pretty cool.
Yeah.
But I think, as he aged and he met my mom and I was born like priorities shift as they do for anybody.
Yeah.
And their priorities were just having a meaningful, quiet life.
Yeah.
You're a famous person, though, now.
I am not.
You're on TV every day, you know what I mean?
Sure.
Does that influence the way that you live as well though, having seen that example from your parents?
I guess so.
But whether anyone knows who I am or not does not necessarily influence the way that I act.
I try to treat people with kindness and respect because that's the right thing to do, not because they might know who I am and if I'm rude to them or whatever, they're going to go post on social media about it.
It's because you should treat people with kindness.
So in what I've learned that your dad did, he said living in fear is not living at all, which is a great quote.
I'm curious what you're afraid of.
Hmm.
My mind's going two places because I'm afraid of small enclosed spaces and elevators, and snakes and like all those types of things.
Yeah bears, i'm scared of bears.
When do you ever encounter a bear?
Never, i'm never going to encounter a bear, that's right.
Yeah, i encounter elevators all the time and i'm always going crazy.
I see, i live in new jersey, so there's like black bears around.
I live.
Okay, that's fair, i live in brooklyn and i is there an elevator in your building?
There is, but i take the stairs.
Yeah, Really.
You do?
I think the stairs did.
Yeah.
Anyway, that's not what the question was.
What about on an airplane?
That's an enclosed space.
You just sort of give yourself over to the experience, I guess.
I don't know.
Humans are hard to figure out.
Things are not black and white.
This video might be, but life is not.
My fear used to be of abandonment when I was... And I learned this through therapy.
I didn't know as a 12 year old or 11 year old whatever, that I had a fear of abandonment because I don't know.
That's a little.
It's an advanced, advanced topic.
But I learned later on that When you go through a traumatic experience like your father being paralyzed, and that shakes your world,
I was not yet three years old when he was injured.
And then we got used to that new normal, but it was a new normal.
And then he dies when I'm 12 and that shakes my world and that introduces grief into the equation.
That's when the fear of being like, what if, what if something, what if I'm alone?
And then I was in the sense that my mom then died.
18 months after my dad.
So I was alone in the sense that my parents were gone, which is a world-altering life-changing, obviously event.
But I was surrounded by so much love that I was never an orphan.
Like, I was not alone in this world, and I never have been, and I never will be.
But I was afraid, it turns out, as a kid, of abandonment.
What if they leave?
And basically, since they've gone, it turns out that I've never been abandoned.
Because yes, they died, but they didn't leave me in here.
I have so many parts of them and memories of them within me.
And I have this whole village of people who love me and who I love right back.
And now I have my wife, and we're going to start a family.
And there's no chance that I could ever be abandoned.
Yeah, this sort of broke my heart.
I think it's in the Superman documentary that you say March 6 2006, which is the day that your mom died.
You said I've been alone since then.
Right.
Man, that's just devastating.
But on January 17th of this year, you got married to your wife, Amanda.
Is that, you know, a before and after there?
Is that bookend moments?
Yeah.
I mean, that's, if you're writing the story, I suppose you could call it the bookend moments.
But again, life not black and white.
What I was trying to say in the documentary, when I said I've been alone since then, is that I haven't had my parents since then.
So that will always leave anyone who goes through that type of loss with a hole in some way.
But I had so many people who loved me and were there for me.
It wasn't like I was asking for money on the sidewalk.
I was well taken care of every day of my life.
But then, meeting Amanda years ago and now being married, that is the culmination or the crowning achievement of a journey that I've been on for quite some time, since my parents died, of proving to them, to me, to the world, that I'm okay and life is great.
You don't have to worry about me.
I feel so loved by Amanda, by our families, by the memories of my parents and by strangers and colleagues and friends.
I've always felt so like, supported and rooted for.
And it's so gratifying.
People seem to want me to succeed, which I am.
It's kind of blows my mind.
I'm so grateful for it, but I'm also like, all right, I'll try.
It goes back to your biggest fear, right?
If all of these people want you to succeed, then it's probably like well shit, I really hope I succeed.
I don't necessarily, I don't crave the approval of other people.
I want people to like me.
Look, I'm on TV for a living, right?
I've got to have some chip in my brain that is seeking external validation of some kind.
But what I do every day is try to live up to the standard that I have set for myself.
And that standard comes from dozens, if not hundreds, of inputs from people and experiences in my life that have shaped me.
You did an interview with Anderson Cooper, I think a couple of years ago, and you made reference to having to sometimes go to a dark place.
You kind of compared it to going to the gym or reading a book.
You go to the gym to strengthen yourself.
You read a book to get smarter.
And you go to a dark place.
And I'm wondering if you can talk about that a little bit.
What do you mean by that?
What is that dark place?
What do you learn from that?
Well, I was speaking in reference to my own grief of losing my parents at a young age.
And for a long time, right after they passed away.
To my point about trying to live for other people or make sure everyone knew that I was okay.
Would often pretend that I was okay when really I wasn't in a terrible place.
But I would have liked a hug or something.
But I got a lot of positive feedback that like, oh, he's doing so well that like I thrived off that.
And then, over time, as I worked on myself and as I just matured, the natural process of growing up and understanding life a little more fully.
Was that?
No, what I actually need to do is lean into the pain that I've lived in my life and let it serve me, as opposed to just having it hang out here, taking up space in my life that could be better utilized for something else.
So going to the dark place doesn't mean sitting in a dark room listening to sad music, or it can.
It's whatever works for you, or in this case, for me at any given time.
The result is I understand myself, my shortcomings, my weaknesses, my dark places a little bit better.
And it enables me to shine a light in there and maybe spruce the place up.
And over time, I think it has made me better adjusted to life and better adjusted to the possibility of other bad things happening.
Because, you know, just because i went through tragic circumstances as a young kid doesn't preclude me from enduring more, yeah in the future.
Yeah, i just got a head start on people, but i think i'm not inoculated by any stretch.
But i'm prepared at least yeah, for any hardship, and it doesn't have to be something as traumatic or dramatic as grief or losing someone.
But any adversity i've probably been through in some form or have a similar experience, so i'm.
That's why i go to the dark place it's.
It's like going to the gym or reading a book.
Yeah, i haven't changed my, changed my uh stance on it since i told anderson that okay, so i have two daughters.
They're ten and seven, and they can both ride a bike uh and, but it took me days, if not weeks, to teach them.
Yeah, your back's probably hurt.
Oh, my god it was.
You know, i'm grateful that they can ride a bike but, like you know that that was a huge pain in the ass right, i loved it.
Loved it, you know.
But your dad taught you how to ride a bike yes, when he was in a wheelchair after his accident.
Tell me about that experience.
It is now one of my favorite memories and was then too, but it has taken on different meaning now because of the significance that it would have to him.
In his wheelchair For years, especially right after the accident, he thought that he would be less of a father because he couldn't do all the physical things that a father might traditionally do have a catch, teach someone to ride a bike.
He was a master communicator.
And he was also probably annoyed that his son was still riding around with training wheels, because we grew up in a neighborhood where every kid was about the same age, but i was just younger than everybody else, so i was always playing catch up and they all knew how to ride a bike and i didn't.
So my dad was like all right, we're going outside.
And when, Let me tell you, I might not have seen my dad as Superman the character, but when Christopher Reeve tells you you're going outside and you're going to learn how to ride a bike, that's what you're doing.
And he was commanding.
And he was my hero and my best friend.
So he told me exactly what to do.
And I did it.
And it worked.
And it was awesome because I then knew how to ride a bike.
And he knew that he was every bit the father that I needed.
And that was more than enough.
Yeah, yeah.
I think that was really gratifying for him.
OK, so in the documentary you made Finding My Father, you make an offhanded remark as you're driving through Baja California.
You say, turns out the road to finding yourself through your father's path is bumpy.
Have you found yourself?
I don't know if I ever fully will.
Yeah?
I understand myself or what animates and motivates me now better than I ever have.
Part of that comes with marriage.
I'm new to the club, but have been in love with my wife for years now.
And we're looking forward to hopefully starting a family.
And that's the number one goal in my life is to just be a father.
So I think I feel I don't know if I've found myself, but I'm certainly I certainly have a better understanding of who I am and who I want to be and how to get Yeah.
Closer to that.
What kind of dad do you want to be?
I want to be emotionally and physically present.
I want my children to know that nothing is more important to me and to their mom than their health and happiness.
I want to be around.
I was so lucky to grow up with two parents who were just around a lot.
We had dinner together basically every night.
They came to all my stuff, school, sports, play dates.
So I didn't have my parents very long, but I got a lot of time with them.
I want to give the same experience to my children.
I want to be a father who my kids look up to, not because of anything I do professionally or what kind of house we have or what car they get driven to school in, but by how their father moves through the world, how he treats other people and how loved at every single second they feel by their father and by their significantly more amazing mother.
That's the goal.
And I will keep constantly checking in on that goal because there's nothing more important.
Yeah.
You visited the set of the most recent Superman movie.
And you saw the actor who played Superman, David, in that suit.
What was that like for you?
That was amazing.
I mean, the whole day was great.
James Gunn.
The director Peter Safran, the executive producer, co-head of DC Studios, invited me and Amanda down.
They were shooting non-actor stuff.
And all of a sudden, they hear, hey, Will.
And I look up, and it's Superman.
And it's David.
And he's carrying his little baby.
It was a Norman Rockwell painting come to life.
He's got this baby in a little pram, little stroller thing.
And he's Superman, full cape and everything.
And it was a joy to meet him.
Then, and we've become friends since, and he's shown up for me.
I've tried to show up for him.
I was lucky enough to have a cameo in the movie, which was cool.
Just getting to be on the set and see this big budget movie get all done was very cool.
And then meeting David, and I let him know as if I'm some custodian of Superman, which my siblings and I most certainly are not.
That was the main message, was like, Do whatever you go for it, man.
We're not the gatekeepers of what Superman is or isn't.
So we said, hey, this is awesome.
You get to play Superman.
That's so cool.
Have a blast.
If we can be of any service, happy to be.
Your father's favorite quote was a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.
What does that mean to you?
It means that everyone can be a hero.
Anyone can be a hero.
We all are ordinary individuals.
We all, whether we know it or not, possess the strength to overcome and endure.
And you don't have to be famous.
You don't have to have been a superhero.
You don't have to go through some terrible adversity and then triumph over it to be a hero.
You don't have to save people's lives.
You just have to face whatever ordinary challenges you or your loved ones face and find the strength to persevere.
And that makes you a hero.
A year and a half after your dad died, your mom dies from lung cancer.
Your neighbors Ralph and Ann Pucci adopt you.
What did you learn from them?
I'm still learning from them.
They're my family.
I learned that family takes many forms.
It's not just who you're born into.
Yeah.
I don't really have enough or the right words to describe what they've meant to me, what they've done for me, how much I love them.
So much of the great stuff that has happened in my life is a direct result of moving in with my next door neighbors and living as close to my previous life as I could have, given the bizarre and tragic circumstances of my parents dying.
I got to go to the same school that I was already going to.
I got to live in the same town.
I got to have the same friends.
And that's really important when you're a preteen and teenager like having a routine and a solid base at home really makes all the difference.
That's what I mean by my life could have been radically different.
Your dad was very close with Robin Williams.
What did you learn from Robin Williams?
That anything can be made funny, anything can be made fun of and that friendships can be brotherhoods.
My dad and Robin didn't call themselves friends.
They called themselves brothers.
The ways that they showed up for each other.
People don't even really know about that.
I don't even really know about that.
Predate me.
And then, of course, the parts that I do know about the way that Robin and his then-wife Marcia, showed up for our family in our time of need, the way that we would try to show up for them whenever they needed something from us.
We would spend a lot of time together, family vacations and things.
And it was just a lot of joy, a lot of reminiscing, a lot of love.
I also learned from Robin there's like a time and a place for everything, in the sense that he was the funniest person maybe ever to live.
He's in the conversation, right?
But he also was one of the smartest, most thoughtful, deepest people that I've ever met.
And there's a time for either of those.
OK, so your new wife, Amanda, is a wedding planner.
She is.
What is it like planning a wedding with somebody who does that professionally?
For me, super convenient.
For her, I think a bit stressful.
She and her mom, Victoria Dubin, are planning partners.
So my wife and mother-in-law run a business that plans these nice weddings.
And they planned our wedding.
Just getting to be along for the ride with my amazing wife, who astounds me in so many ways, as she created her own dream.
She took dreams from her head and her heart and made them real.
And to get to be at the center of that but also see all the really hard work that went into it just gave me a new level of appreciation for what she does, how hard what she does is and how gratifying it can be for the people who get to experience it.
You write notes to Amanda when you travel, yes?
Yes.
Yeah?
Or she to me.
Yeah, that's what we do.
Why is that so important?
It's such a delight.
I travel all the time for work.
It's not fun just going to bed and waking up alone in a hotel room in a strange city.
I never wake up with the sun because I'm always out the door getting ready for Good Morning America, and it's always dark.
And that can get lonely and tedious and tiring.
And so to open my toiletry kit or take out my gym shoes and find a Post-it in Amanda's handwriting just nothing crazy, just special.
Like, I love you.
Have a good trip.
I'll see you soon.
Just makes me feel closer to her, closer to home.
And I try to reciprocate when she travels or leave a note on the mirror.
It's just a nice little gesture of love.
And we keep them.
So now we have just a collection.
Yeah.
So for your nuptials you wore your dad's cufflinks and a Todd Snyder pocket square that had your mom's handwriting on it.
What did it say?
It said, I love you.
And Amanda gave it me.
I open up this box and it's a white pocket square.
And then I like open one of the folds and I see immediately recognized my mom's handwriting and it's embroidered I love you.
And I immediately start crying because I knew what it was.
And I look to Amanda, I go how did you do this?
Like oh my god, this is the most meaningful, like special, thoughtful thing.
And she found a letter that my mom had written and And then took just I love you and sent it to.
I don't know the person who sews things into pocket squares.
And I wore it at our wedding.
And I will cherish that forever as a physical item, and what it says about the person I love most in the world, my wife, and who she is.
I loved it.
And we're wearing, it's my dad's wedding ring.
No way, really?
And she's got my mom's.
Wow.
That's very cool.
We had these in a safe for 20 years.
Wow.
I'm lucky enough to have both of my parents alive right now.
But I imagine that one of the hard parts, as time goes on, is not being able to call them and tell them about significant moments in your life.
Yeah.
You just got married.
What is something that you know about your wedding day or that whole experience that you wish you could tell your mom and dad so much?
I wish I could tell them the minute-by-minute breakdown.
But I think to distill down the message that I would want to share with them is like I'm doing great.
Life is so great.
I am so happy.
I married the woman that I love, and we're hoping to start a family.
And the room for our wedding was filled with people who we love and who love us.
And it was really fun, and it was beautiful.
Amanda and her mom designed the hell out of it.
Everything went to plan.
It was just the perfect night, perfect weekend, perfect start to this new chapter of our lives.
And I thought about my parents the whole time, of course, but not in a sad way.
Of course I wished they were there and we made gestures to them in reference to them to remind ourselves and our guests that my parents were present, but we didn't let it hang over in a negative way at all about what we've lost.
It was more about what we were creating together and i thought about them at that moment in their lives in 1992, when they got married and all that, they that that lay ahead for them, or so they thought.
And then their lives changed so drastically and i know how happy i am right now.
I know what i have planned for the future.
But what unforeseen obstacles are out there i'll never be able to know.
But i know right now I am happy and fulfilled and on this path that feels so right for me and for Amanda, and let's cherish that and be as present as we can.
And so what I would want them to know is that that's what I was thinking about and that I'm really doing great.
And the wedding was a physical manifestation of of that, I suppose.
What's your perception of God now compared to when you were 12?
My perception of God?
You should do this for a living.
I want to say something smart and interesting, but I don't really have something interesting.
But I will tell you that I think when I was 12, I was pretty convinced that God didn't exist, because I thought when bad, scary things happened, you were supposed to pray that they didn't.
So I prayed that they didn't, and yet they did.
So I was convinced like, oh, well, the line's clearly disconnected.
There's nobody up there on the other end.
But then I've lived subsequent decades.
So many blessings have come my way.
So many challenges that I could grow from have come my way.
So many pieces of evidence arguing in favor of something bigger than all of us have presented themselves that I think I have a more open-minded idea of God or religion.
In conversation with you.
There's this line from a Bruce Springsteen song Badlands, that keeps echoing in my head.
The line is, it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive.
When you're having these moments of joy at your wedding or something like that, or even in the past.
Was there ever any kind of a feeling like I should be grieving right now, or something?
I don't.
So to sort of reframe it a little bit because I've never felt guilt for finding joy in my life.
I've never felt that I should be sad in a moment where I was not because it is a gift to be happy.
And my parents and anyone would want me to be happy.
What I did at a younger age wonder in the moments of like pure, carefree joy was like.
Is it, should I be like?
Why am I not sad?
And then I realized, like, you should be grateful for that.
The fact, you know what I mean?
Like, life is hard enough.
That in moments of joy, let them be joyous.
Don't drag yourself down for no reason.
Do you ever get sick of people like me asking you questions about grief?
No.
It's something we should talk about more.
Yeah.
Simple as that.
I have experience.
Yeah.
And I was raised, if you have the ability to help someone in some way, you should.
So if me talking about grief makes it easier for someone to either talk about their own grief or understand their own grief,
Yeah.
Please, let me.
Yeah.
Let's talk about your career again for just a moment.
What's the five, 10-year plan?
Oh, man.
Do you want to be an evening anchor?
Is it something beyond?
I like waking up early.
You do?
I like GMA.
I'm a morning person.
You like waking up that early?
I do.
I mean, this is a cliche question to ask somebody who's on a morning show, but what time do you wake up?
On a normal day where I'm a correspondent, which is my job I'm a national correspondent.
I wake up 5 AM, a little bit before, which plenty of people do.
Yeah, I was going to say, that's not terrible.
I thought you were going to be like 2 o'clock in the morning.
No, but when I anchor, when I have the privilege of filling in on the anchor desk, then I wake up at 4.
It takes me half an hour to get out the door.
From the time I wake up to the time I leave, it's half an hour no matter what.
The 5 to 10 year plan suggests that I have a full comprehension of where my industry is going or what new technologies will be dominant.
New platforms will be in vogue.
But overall, to keep it as broad as possible, is I love what I do.
I want to do more of it at a bigger scale.
I intend to hang out with my family.
I know that's not a professional realm, but that's the...
Whatever gets me closer to more time with my family will be how I orient my career.
Yeah.
In your dad's What I've Learned interview, the interviewer asked him a question that's basically the same one that I asked you, which is where are you going to be in 10 years?
And your dad's answer was if you come and see me in 10 years, I will walk to the door and answer it.
In your role on the board of directors of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, do you think that we are close to that kind of treatment for somebody in your dad's condition, which is they could get up and walk again?
Yeah.
The hope that my dad trafficked in all those years ago is only more tangible and an even greater currency now because of the expansion of scope of treatments and potential cures for spinal cord injuries and paralysis.
Now there are technologies that didn't exist when my dad was injured, that have allowed people to regain physical functions in terms of stepping and standing and walking, but also secondary functions like bowel control, bladder control, sexual function, temperature regulation all the things that go out the window when you get paralyzed, when your brain stops being able to communicate with the rest of your body, that people take for granted.
There are technologies that with some simple implantation bring those back.
So my dad's idea of I'm gonna get up and walk to the door was probably unrealistic when he said that to Esquire at the time.
But he had to think that way because that's what got him up every morning.
That's what sustained him.
But now, to answer your question, yeah, we're closer.
I credit and we all do at the Reeve Foundation and people in the spinal cord injury and paralysis communities credit my dad and my mom for leading the charge.
When my dad was injured spinal cord injury research was considered the graveyard of neuroscience, meaning nobody really wanted to do it because it was so hopeless.
People get a spinal cord injury, whatever function they regain in the first 24 to 48 hours.
That's probably what you got.
And it was about pain and life management from that point on.
It's a booming field in the sense that people see real potential.
So the hope is even more real than it was then.
Yeah.
I heard a podcast that you did with David Kessler, who's your grief counselor, right?
And you said something in that podcast that, I gotta be honest with you, I didn't quite believe.
You said, I wouldn't change a thing about my life.
You mean that.
I stand by that and I always will.
Really?
I've had the best life.
Every single day of my life has been a privilege in every sense of that word.
I was born to the two best parents ever to do it.
I was raised in a community and in a home environment that I think had the right values.
I was given love and support and encouragement and conquerable challenges every day.
I had the opportunity to go to great schools.
I've had a lot of friends.
I've gotten to travel the world.
I have a great job.
I have an amazing wife.
There's food on the table at all my meals.
I have a roof over my head.
I wouldn't change a thing about my life.
The reason you probably don't believe me is the pesky fact that my dad was paralyzed, then died, then my mom died, and that all happened in a very short period of time, when I was very young.
Why I wouldn't change.
That is because it gave me a lot of strength and resolve and toughness that a lot of people would be well served to have in their lives.
Wow.
Okay, now you've convinced me.
All right.
The last question is if you could give advice to your younger self, and there's kind of so many moments I would be curious about.
But you know, your three-year-old self, your 12-year-old self, you know, and so on.
But I want you to choose that.
If you could go back and give advice, knowing what you know now, what would you tell that younger version of Will Reeve?
I think I would tell every version whether it was a decade ago.
Young 20s Decade prior to that, when my mom dies 13.
Decade prior to that, three.
Tell Will at all those ages, it's going to be all right.
Just keep moving forward.
Just know that you're going to be OK.
And also maybe buy some Amazon stock.
Will Reeve, thank you very much for being here.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, this was great.
Watch him on Good Morning America.
Watch him on World News Tonight.
Watch him where else?
I don't really post on Instagram, but you can check me out there.
Check him out on Instagram.
Watch me wherever.
