Ryan Reynolds: Lifelong friend tried to sell photo of my baby

Film star Ryan Reynolds, who with his actress wife, Blake Lively, has been adamant about their infant daughter's privacy, says a lifelong friend betrayed him by attempting to sell a photo of the child.

"A guy that I'd known for my whole life, one of my closest friends growing up, he had been shopping pictures of my baby around," Reynolds, 38, says in a GQ interview posted yesterday. "I kind of got in front of it, which is good. But it was a slightly dark period. A bad couple of weeks."

The experience, he told the magazine, "was like a death. It was like one of those devastating things to find out." Reynolds, whose film "Mississippi Grind" opens Friday and who stars in the Marvel Comics film "Deadpool" early next year, said the unnamed person did it "just for money. I mean, I don't think he thought he would ever be caught. But it's a pretty narrow group of people that I would send photos like that to. They're just, like, my closest family and my closest friends: 'Here's us in the delivery room!' "

The actor said he had helped his now former friend monetarily in the past, but "he'd asked for a check enough times where I was like, 'There's no more checks to be had.' "

The two had "a pretty strongly worded conversation" about the disloyalty, Reynolds said, adding: "It was, like, so kind of shocking. There isn't really a conversation to have. It's just, 'Oh, well, now I'm never going to see you or talk to you again, unfortunately.' That's kind of how it worked out."