How Wolverine and Hugh Jackman Saved Deadpool and Ryan Reynolds in 2 Realities

Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, and director Shawn Levy discuss the long, difficult road to a third Deadpool movie in a new interview with Vanity Fair. According to Reynolds, “These movies just swallow lives whole. In a normal movie, you work your ass off. But on a movie like this, you forsake a lot of things that you maybe took for granted: sleep, seeing your family, the myth of the present father. There’s a lot of sacrifice.”

Reynolds knew he wanted to reunite with Levy after working together on 2022’s The Adam Project, but struggled to find a hook to justify a third Deadpool movie. Luckily, Jackman had an epiphany: “It was August 15, 2022. I was driving at the start of a week’s vacation from Broadway. The Broadway thing is full-on—we were nine months in, six days a week. When you get a week off, there’s something so miraculous about it and freeing. I was sitting on a beach, not a care in the world, and for some reason, the thought came into my head: What do you want to do? And the first two things had nothing to do with work—then literally, I thought: Deadpool-Wolverine. I want to do that movie. That’s what I want. Fairly quickly after came another thought: But you’ve already finished with Logan. We stuck the landing. What are people going to think? And I just said to my brain: Stop. That’s what I wanted. Then I had an hour and a half to drive home, and I thought, I’ve got to ring Ryan. I didn’t know where they were in the process, but I actually thought you guys might be about to start filming.”

Pairing Deadpool with Wolverine was exactly the hook they needed. According to Reynolds, “If you’re looking at the Venn diagram or the overlap of these two characters, as vastly different as they are, the thing they have most in common is shame. They both live in this violent shame cycle. Deadpool’s a very verbose character. He’s very feminine and kind of open and childlike. And putting that next to a character whose archetype is very Clint Eastwood creates something pretty interesting.”

In the upcoming film, the pair are recruited by the Time Variance Authority introduced in the Disney+ series, Loki, to face an existential threat that could spell doom for both Disney and Sony’s wings of the MCU. It’s both an excuse to get Wolverine back in the saddle for another adventure—conveniently removed from time and space, so as not to step on the toes of Logan—while providing ample fodder for Deadpool to riff on corporate greed and copyright law. As Jackman told the magazine, “Ryan beautifully describes Deadpool’s brain as a half-baked omelet. And so, whatever he’s doing—talking to a camera, to Wolverine—it’s just another layer of annoying crap that I’ve got to put up with. Who knows what the hell he is doing? But it’s just another excuse to punch him in the face.”

What the article fails to note is that Deadpool already did this in his second movie, in a story which saw the character team with the laconic time-traveling soldier, Cable, for mutually beneficial purposes; in Deadpool & Wolverine, it’s just on a grander scale. We’ll see if the character makes the same observation when the film opens in theaters this July 26.

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