“I wished upon a star that Hugh [Jackman] would one day put the yellow suit on and be Wolverine alongside me as Deadpool,” laments Ryan Reynolds when asked about getting his iconic character, Deadpool/Wade, on to the big screen alongside Hugh Jackman as his own iconic character, Wolverine/Logan, which we’ll be seeing this summer in the shape of Deadpool & Wolverine.
To get the two together would seem impossible. Jackman first played the clawed anti-hero back in 2000 for the first X-Men movie and after 17 years of playing him, bowed out in a major (and heroic) way in the 2017 movie Logan after announcing he wouldn’t be playing the character anymore.
But then he saw Deadpool…
“I meant what I said when I said I’m done, that Logan was going to be my last,” Jackman says. “I announced it before we’d shot Logan. And about three days after that, I saw Deadpool in 2016. About 15 minutes into the movie, I was like ‘oops, maybe I should have watched this first!’
“I could see those two characters together. I was watching Deadpool and all I kept thinking about was ‘The Odd Couple’, ‘Planes Trains and Automobiles’, I could see how these two characters would work.
“I can tell you the date: 14 August. I was doing theater on 14 August 2022. I was driving and it came to me that I wanted to do it again. I wanted to do it with Ryan playing Deadpool, and I wanted these two characters together. I knew that it was about to shoot, so I pulled over to the side of the road, and I rang Ryan and I said, ‘Ryan, I want to do this, please tell me you’ll do this, please tell me I really want to do it!’”
Of course Ryan said yes. In fact, a team up movie for the two characters was the first story he had pitched to Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios: “My very first pitch to Marvel was a Deadpool and Wolverine movie,” he nods. Ryan’s first idea for the team-up movie was based on the Japanese classic Rashomon, where Wolverine and Deadpool find themselves in a shared adventure, yet each character’s perspective tells a different tale: “That first act is just through the prism of my experience. The second act is Wolverine and the third act is the objective experience,” Reynolds explains of that first pitch. “I pitched that and, he didn’t use these exact words, but Kevin was like, ‘No’. In fact, I think there was an ‘absolutely not’ there,” he laughs.
Cue a few brainstorms later and a Deadpool 3 was back on the cards, directed by Shawn Levy (who has worked with both Jackman and Reynolds on Free Guy and Real Steal among others).
That August phone call by the side of the road was pretty handy, then, because even though they had Feige on board, Reynolds and Levy were still determining what a third Deadpool movie would actually look like: “It was as simple as fake it till you make it on the Zoom with Kevin and the team. We sort of bullshitted our way through it,” Reynolds laughs. “Then Shawn and I kind of said, ‘this is crazy [but] Hugh called today and said he wants to come back’. Then we kind of loosely pitched a movie that was flying by the seat of our pants!”
Having Hugh on board sealed the deal for a third Deadpool movie. Not only that, but the pair realised that having the character in their new movie would add an important element: “As soon as Hugh called, as soon as we contemplated this duo finally, it gave this third Deadpool movie its ‘why’,” Levy explains. “It’s given us the heart of the movie.”
So all that was left to do was to write the full story. Oh and that pesky detail that Logan *spoilers* died in the ending of Logan. “Logan is very sacred,” Reynolds nods. “We all revere that film and Hugh’s performance, so finding the ‘how’ was really interesting. But once we locked into that, in large part to Hugh, and his thought process around the role and the character, then it was just so much fun. Writing this kind of movie, you don’t really write the comedy much. You come back to that. You have to write a movie that works emotionally.”
Indeed, Deadpool & Wolverine starts from an emotional place: Deadpool is living a quiet and unfulfilling life, stuck in a dead-end job selling cars. However, when the Time Variance Authority (TVA) sets him on a mission to save his universe, he collides with a Wolverine from another universe (who is dealing with plenty of demons of his own) and the two must team up (begrudgingly. Very begrudgingly) to save their universes.
With a story as epic as that, and ensuring that aforementioned heart via Wolverine alongside Deadpool’s archetypal wit all needing to be included in the movie, Levy had a big job on his hands to make sure the tone of the movie would be kept on the straight and narrow.
“That’s the job,” he nods. “Tone is the job. [Ryan and I] come to this with the same reverence and love of these characters. So that was the North Star, what feels honest for Wade, what feels honest for Logan. But really, the unlocking of this movie is the magic thing that happens when you combine not only these two characters, but these two actors, and that leads to a movie that has a lot of heart, and a lot of emotion. The movie goes to kind of poignant places and ultimately it’s a movie about friendship. I think the emotion of the movie might be one of its most subversive elements.”
“It was such a treat to write dialogue for Wolverine and for Deadpool,” Reynolds adds. “We’re straddling this line of it’s almost like it’s Ryan and Hugh speaking to each as friends who’ve known each other for almost two decades and been through a lot together. He and I are very outwardly joke but in real life most of our conversations are intense and emotional.”
Reynolds’ and Jackman’s real-life friendship is hilariously out there for everyone to see, with the two consistently (and hilariously) trolling each other over social media. However, until now the two had never starred in a movie together and it’s clear the pair, along with Levy, have relished being able to create a movie together, finally.
“I don’t mean to sound esoteric about it or a little too sappy or emotional, but we really feel like the three of us kind of loved each other into this moment, with the way this movie turned out,” Reynolds says. “It’s rare that you have an experience that is kind of peerless and then that experience somehow is even better on the screen. The movie just feels so complete and also a different type of movie for the MCU, which we’re all immensely proud of.”
Ah, yes. The MCU-sized elephant in the room. Without going into too much detail of the wranglings of comic book rights, the character of Deadpool (and a bunch of other Marvel characters, including Spider-Man) had been owned by 20th Century Fox and not Marvel Studios, which is why Deadpool 1 and 2 aren’t officially part of the MCU. However, Disney (who does own Marvel Studios) acquired Fox in 2017 meaning Deadpool can officially be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and boy does he make that known, with a shed load of Avenger-related nods in Deadpool & Wolverine, including, ahem, a comment or two about the MCU’s recent downward trend.
With Disney’s purchase of 20th Century Fox, it means the MCU can play in the sandbox of all the characters owned by the latter company, including all the characters in X-Men which not only includes Wolverine himself but other iconic mutants, including Professor X (played by Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy in previous movies).
This movie sees the introduction of Cassandra Nova, Professor X’s evil telekinetic sister, who is played by The Crown’s Emma Corrin. Coincidentally, Corrin’s own Deadpool-related phone call came at a slightly opportune, though painful, moment: “When I got the call, I didn’t hesitate,” they remember. “I had just got a chemical peel and my whole face shed, like burned off my face. I remember my team saying, we’ve got this meeting, and I was so excited but I was like ‘I can’t do this’. I looked like I’d had a terrible accident and then I Googled Cassandra and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m fine. Because she looks fucked!’” they laugh
“I had such a great chat with Shawn and Ryan. When we started chatting about Cassandra, they brought so much to the table in terms of creating this amazing space where they had a real idea of what they wanted, and needed her to be for the film. But there was also so much freedom to bring stuff that I also discovered along the way.”
Unsurprisingly, being the sister of Professor X, Cassandra is bald, though perhaps more surprisingly, she has long fingers with which she probes into people’s minds. For Corrin, the makeup element of the role brought with it a few surprises, as well as being helpful for getting into the villain mindset: “I always find that those bits help,” they nod. “It’s kind of like the last section that you zip up into that person totally, but especially for this role, because I had this bald cap, and there was always a moment in makeup where they were like, right, put down your phone, because I had these prosthetic fingers on. Literally from that point, there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom alone. It was humbling.
“Having that extension of your hands really changes the way you carry your arms and everything, which was really helpful. Because all of Cassandra’s power comes through, if not her mind, her gestures. [Though] apparently there was one person who came to set who thought they were my real fingers!”
All this talk of comic book rights, X-Men, X-Men’s sisters and multiverses seems pretty complicated, especially for the filmmakers who have this giant world to play in. How do they even begin to juggle everything together? “With such a rich history and mythology, with 85 years of publishing history, 33 movies, 12 series and Sony movies, and Fox movies, the answer is I don’t have to navigate it alone,” answers Deadpool & Wolverine’s producer Wendy Jacobson. “[But] to produce a movie of this scale with these guys at the helm honestly, just felt very easy, and didn’t even really feel like a job. I just a real joy and delight every day.”
Indeed, with so many characters to utilise, will we be seeing another team-up for Deadpool? “I cannot even imagine thinking about what’s next after this,” Reynolds laughs. “Sometimes you can get really lucky with timing. I feel like Deadpool 1 was the great beneficiary of a cultural landscape that was changing quite rapidly, and we got pretty lucky to be in the right place at the right time.
“And I feel like this movie is also that. I mean, writing lines like Deadpool deliriously believing that he’s the Messiah or Marvel Jesus – these are things that were written before any kind of analysis of a larger systemic storytelling issue might be at play in the media. So I’m really lucky in that way. I love being able to do a movie that is in and of itself, just a movie. Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t a commercial for another movie. It’s just not part of the DNA.”
“You’re so lucky,” Jackman adds. “A lot of people don’t know how jealous Wolverine can be. If you mentioned anyone else I will kill them.
“Particularly if it’s another Australian.”
Deadpool & Wolverine is out in cinemas now