Everybody loves Ryan Reynolds. There’s no doubt about it. So, prepare yourself to love him SO much more (if that’s even possible).
Ahead of the release of Deadpool & Wolverine, Ryan recalled filming the first Deadpool movie during an interview with the New York Times.
Not only did he reveal that he didn’t think the movie would be successful, but he also said that he paid the movie’s screenwriters, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, out-of-pocket so that they could be on set.
“No part of me was thinking when Deadpool was finally greenlit that this would be a success,” he said. At its release, Deadpool was the number-one movie at the box office during its opening weekend and made over $132 million. The movie’s total gross is over $363 million…so I guess we can say it was *pretty successful*.
“I even let go of getting paid to do the movie just to put it back on the screen: They wouldn’t allow my cowriters 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,” he continued.
“It was a lesson in a couple of senses,” he added. “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.”
Back in 2016, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick revealed that they’d been working on the Deadpool script alongside Ryan for at least six years prior. “It was really a core creative team of us, Ryan, and the director Tim Miller. Fox, interestingly, wouldn’t pay for us to be on set. Ryan Reynolds paid out of his own money, out of his own pocket,” they said. And even though Ryan was a co-collaborator on that first film, he didn’t receive a writing credit until Deadpool 2.
And now that the franchise is such a success, Ryan explained that he didn’t want “more money” than they needed to make Deadpool & Wolverine. “Necessity is the mother of invention. The more constraints you place on a creative process, the more you think outside of the box,” he said. “So, personally, I didn’t want more money than we needed. We wanted just enough money to make what we set out to make, but also find ways to creatively pivot.”
Deadpool & Wolverine releases in theaters on July 26.
