The two friends have learned a lot about being the stewards of major pop-culture characters, an education that led them to Deadpool & Wolverine.
If there’s a magic formula for Hollywood success, Deadpool & Wolverine would appear to have refined it to a simple calculation: Just add Hugh Jackman’s X-Men superhero to the hit comic franchise anchored by Ryan Reynolds and reap the sure-to-be-lucrative dividends.
So why did a film that’s projected to be the summer’s biggest live-action blockbuster prove so difficult to get off the ground?
Although Reynolds had pitched a team-up to his close friend for years, Jackman initially resisted, preferring to let the well-reviewed Logan (2017) stand as his swan song with the gruff mutant Wolverine. And while the merger of Disney and Fox allowed Reynolds to set the third Deadpool movie starring his R-rated mercenary in the previously off-limits Marvel Cinematic Universe, he struggled to come up with a story that could capitalise on that opportunity. “It was just hard to find the thing that felt right,” Reynolds said.
In August 2022, just as Reynolds and director Shawn Levy debated putting their sequel on ice, Jackman placed a surprise call and told them he was willing to give his signature role one more go. “There’s parts of Wolverine that I scratched around and wanted to explore, but I wasn’t able to,” Jackman said. “In this film, there’s sides of him that I’ve always wanted to get out.”
On a video call in late June, both men had plenty to say about the long arc of portraying and eventually becoming the steward of major pop-cultural characters. Reynolds waged an uphill battle to make the first Deadpool film (2016), which was greenlit only after leaked test footage became an internet sensation. Off its modest US$58 million ($96m) budget, the movie grossed US$782.8m ($1.3 billion) worldwide and gave Reynolds his first real franchise.
“I was an actor who was semi-well-known,” said Reynolds, who added jokingly, “I don’t know how you would phrase that without sounding like a dink. But I was 37 when Deadpool had its pop-culture phenomenon moment, and I’m really grateful I was because I knew exactly how to enjoy it.”
While the first film was in theatres, he stood in a hotel room overlooking Los Angeles — “this place that I’d been busting my ass in for 18 years at that point” — and remembered feeling an appreciation for the series of small successes and false starts that led him to what now felt like superstardom.
“Those young actors, I don’t know how they deal with it,” Reynolds said. “I’ve got a tremendous empathy for those folks who have to process something that is not possible to process at that age, before your cerebral cortex is even developed.”
The 55-year-old Jackman, who has been playing Wolverine for two-and-a-half decades, nodded in recognition as Reynolds spoke. For the first X-Men film, Jackman was flown to Canada to hastily replace Dougray Scott, who had dropped out because of scheduling conflicts. Wolverine was Jackman’s first Hollywood role, and it vaulted him straight onto the A-list.
“Hearing you talk, I’m glad I was 30 when it happened and not 20,” he told Reynolds.
Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Q: At what point did each of you realise this may be the signature role of your career?
Hugh Jackman: In 1999, when I first started, I’d never read the comics, so I really didn’t have that much context of how important it was. It happened when my paperwork wasn’t right at customs in Canada and I was told I’m being sent back. I was like, “Oh, I just lost the biggest break of my life.” I told the guy behind the counter, who had been so cold, and he goes, “Sorry, I don’t understand. You mean you’re an animator?” And I said, “No. It’s a normal movie, live action.” He goes, “Hang on, you’re Wolverine in live action?” And then I was doing photos, autographs, and every bit of paperwork just got stamped.
Ryan Reynolds: Bureaucratic antidotes.
Jackman: So that was the beginning of it. But in terms of legacy, I guess it happened around X-Men 2 or 3 for me. It took a while before I realised because we were coming at a time where there was no genre, really, of comic-book movies. It really started to take off with Spider-Man and Batman and X-Men
Q: Ryan, you began developing a Deadpool movie 20 years ago, long before you started playing him.
Reynolds: When I finally got to make it, it had been almost 10 years at that point. No part of me was thinking when Deadpool was finally greenlit that this would be a success. I even let go of getting paid to do the movie just to put it back on the screen: They wouldn’t allow my co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick on set, so I took the little salary I had left and paid them to be on set with me so we could form a de facto writers room.
It was a lesson in a couple of senses. I think one of the great enemies of creativity is too much time and money, and that movie had neither time nor money. It really fostered focusing on character over spectacle, which is a little harder to execute in a comic-book movie. I was just so invested in every micro-detail of it and I hadn’t felt like that in a long, long time. I remembered wanting to feel that more — not just on Deadpool, but on anything.
Q: When did you feel like you had real control over where your character would go?
Jackman: Certainly not at the beginning, because X-Men was also my first film in America. I was very much at the mercy of everyone else: “OK, we’re doing a sequel, great. Oh, you’ve written a script? Let’s have a look.” I think it crystallised by the time I got to Logan, where I was very much involved. You know, I had a two-picture deal [for the first two Wolverine spinoffs], so I had really no choice for the first two.
Reynolds: Two-picture deal? They kind of phoned that in, didn’t they? You don’t usually hear that: “Got a half-picture deal.”
Jackman: This was how naive I was: They offered a three-picture deal, and my agent rang me and said, “I’ve got them down to a two-picture deal.” I said, “What? Why did you do that?” And he laughed. He goes, “You’ll work it out eventually.”
Reynolds: I would have killed the agent.
Jackman: “Three movies, that’s three jobs!” But from that moment on, I had a choice whether to do it or not. So for me, it was always about is there a reason to tell this story? By Logan, that’s why I said, “I’m out, I think I’ve reached the end of what I have to offer.” And then it was seeing the first Deadpool in a screening room that had me going, “Oh, hang on. There’s another reason.”
Reynolds: Hugh probably had the biggest imprint on me because one of my earlier jobs was to play Deadpool in his movie, X-Men Origins: Wolverine [2009], and I will never forget seeing what it looked like to lead and produce a movie with humility and a level of graciousness that I frankly had never seen in this business before. It really was an antidote to cynicism for me at the time — I remember thinking, “Oh, you can be successful and content and really good at what you do, and you don’t have to be some tortured schmuck who’s willfully hurting themselves to find some kind of vaporous artistic truth.”
My first day, I walked off the set and Hugh said, “How do you feel?” And I muttered, “Ah, I wish I could go back to that scene we shot earlier in the day because now I sort of see it.” Five minutes later, everyone is being asked to come out of their trailers, lights are being flipped back on, wardrobe is being zipped back up. Hugh made it so I could shoot. He didn’t even know me, we had just met. I thought, “If I’m ever lucky enough to be breathing the rare air that this guy breathes, this is how you do it.”
I still pinch myself because we can be best friends but I can also be going, “That’s Hugh [expletive] Jackman, wow.” That never gets old.
Jackman: Thanks, brother.
Q: Hugh, you met Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige on his very first movie, since he was an associate producer on the first X-Men. What do you remember about him then?
Jackman: I was flying up to do a [screen] test with the director, and it was lunch hour. The director was like, “I don’t understand what’s going on, I’ve got Dougray Scott playing the part. Why am I auditioning another guy?” I’ve never known more that I’m not getting a part. Anyway, as I left, Kevin came up and said, “Hey man, I’ll drive you to the airport.” I said, “Kev, you don’t have to. I’ll just get a cab.” And he goes, “No, no. I’ve made us a reservation, we’ll get a steak before you get on the plane.” I said, “Kev, please. We’re all grown-ups here. We all know what’s going on and you don’t have to do that.” But he did, and he took me out for a steak dinner.
Reynolds: He didn’t know whether you were going to get it or not?
Jackman: No, he was just being a really good guy. We sat and chatted, and then he literally dropped me off at the airport. So we did bond on that film, big time, when I got the part. He was slipping me some comic books under the radar because the director [Bryan Singer] didn’t want them on set.
Reynolds: Curious.
Jackman: I think he was worried about people reading the comic, that people would think they were two-dimensional. So we became close and I was so, so happy for [Feige] as his star rocketed.
Q: Ryan, before this movie came together, you batted around some other ideas and scripts for the next Deadpool movie, including a Christmas movie and an X-Force team-up that would use characters from the second Deadpool film. Did you scrap those as soon as the Disney-Fox merger happened?
Reynolds: I don’t want to overplay the idea that I would sit down and hammer out a whole 120-page screenplay each time I believed in something, but yeah, I wrote lots of treatments and different versions. It was just hard to land a story idea that felt right to Marvel. Ironically, the first pitch I had five or six years ago with Kevin Feige was a Deadpool-and-Wolverine movie. It’s always the thing I want. Even when I saw that first trailer for Logan, I wrote a short that went in front of it [the movie]. I wanted to orbit that movie in any way I could, even if it meant stealing the spotlight for the first two minutes before your premise even rolled.
Q: You told Vanity Fair that making a Deadpool movie swallows lives whole in a way that your other movies don’t.
Reynolds: I don’t think you can do a movie like this unless you’re all in. Physically, this guy has to train, but it’s not even so much about an aesthetic as it is locking your brain into it.
Jackman: With these characters in particular, I’m keenly aware of how I’ve caught lightning in a bottle. I give everything because I respect the character, I respect the culture of the fans, the legacy of the comic books. Maybe it’s because I’m 55, but I just feel a whole opening-up and enjoying of playing this character in a way I haven’t before. Doing it with Ryan, one of my best friends, was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had. So I never take it lightly. It’s the opposite of that.
Reynolds: I’m the same. I mean, this character changed my whole life, it’s like the mother ship for me. There was never a second where any one of us were ever on cruise control. And then the rating informed a lot of it, really deliberately steering away from that use of it as shock value and using it as a means to tell a story about these two guys that’s much more authentic than you could if you were bound by a PG-13 rating.
Q: How does the R rating let you tell a story that’s more authentic?
Reynolds: Well, I’m not saying that other people should do this, but my 9-year-old watched the movie with me and my mum, who’s in her late 70s, and it was just was one of the best moments of this whole experience for me. Both of them were laughing their guts out, were feeling the emotion where I most desperately hoped people would be. When I saw rated-R movies when I was a kid, they left a huge impression on me because I didn’t feel like people were pulling punches, and it’s been a huge inspiration to so many of the things that I look to make now.
In terms of the emotion, I’ve waited forever to do a movie with this guy, and I think he’s waited a long time to do something like this with me, so there are scenes where it’s pretty hard to distinguish between Wade Wilson talking to Logan and Ryan talking to Hugh. I love that, I get goose bumps even just talking about it. That’s the kind of stuff that I will carry with me till my inevitable death in a hail of Danish bullets. Oh, I have a whole plan. I don’t even think they have guns in Denmark, which is one reason I will one day move there.
Jackman: You’ll die by rubber bullets.
Reynolds: Yes, exactly. I’ll die by wry cynicism and lonely winter nights.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Kyle Buchanan
Photographs by: Mustafah Abdulaziz
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