After a six-year hiatus, Deadpool is back, and this time, he has a most unexpected partner in crime: Wolverine. How on earth is Wolverine back? Didn’t he die in Logan? The answer is yes, he very much died in Logan, but this is the Marvel Cinematic Universe—anything is possible. Deadpool & Wolverine’ throws two of Marvel’s most popular and enduring characters together & while their personalities clash they share some common ground. Both are loners with troubled pasts and a taste for violence. In the comics this shared experience has formed an unlikely bond between the two of them that we haven’t gotten to see on the big screen until now…
Actors, Hugh Jackman & Ryan Reynolds, like their characters share a frenemy-ship on & off screen with their online banter being almost as entertaining as the film itself. ‘I hope everyone gets to work with their best friend at least once in their lifetime’ joked Ryan Reynolds when launching the film’s trailer online.
At the global press conference, the film’s stars including the new superduo, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman joined writer-director Shawn Levy and executive producer Wendy Jacobson in a question-and-answer session with broadcaster Edith Bowman. Reynolds, who first starred as Deadpool in 2016, is a dedicated Wolverine fan who has tried for years to bring the two characters together on screen. “I wished upon a star that Hugh would one day put on the yellow suit and be Wolverine alongside me as Deadpool. My first pitch to Marvel was a Deadpool and Wolverine movie, and he didn’t use the exact words, but Kevin [Feige] said no.”
Despite his best efforts to get the idea accepted, Reynolds says it was, in fact, Jackman who brought the successful pitch to Marvel. Jackman says he never intended to play Wolverine again, but seeing the first Deadpool film changed his mind.
“The truth is, I meant what I said when I said I’m done. Logan was going to be my last time. I announced it before we shot Logan, and about three days after that, I saw Deadpool 1. About 15 minutes into the movie, I was like, oops. For the next four or five years, I could see those two characters together. I kept thinking about 48 Hours, The Odd Couple, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles and I could see how these two characters would work.”
Jackman says he was driving to a theatre in August 2022 when it hit him how much he wanted to play Wolverine again.
“It came to me that I wanted to do it again, that I wanted to do it with Ryan playing Deadpool. I wanted these two characters together. I pulled over to the side of the road. I rang Ryan and said, ” I want to do this; please tell me you’ll do this. Ryan said the timing is amazing because we’re about to have a meeting to pitch our last pitch to Marvel in about three hours.”
With no time to prepare a new pitch, Reynolds says he had to wing the meeting with Marvel’s top brass.
“[We had] to fake it until you make it on Zoom with Kevin and the team. We bullshitted our way through it. We said we got the call from Hugh and how it feels serendipitous, and we loosely pitched a movie that was just flying by the seat of our pants.”
Reynolds says it was important to respect Wolverine’s last outing in Logan and that once they got to grips with the direction they wanted to take the characters, writing the script was quite easy.
“Logan is very sacred; we all revere that film and Hugh’s performance, so finding the how [to bring him back] was really interesting, but once we locked into that, in large part down to Hugh, the thought process around the role and the character, was so much fun. When you are writing this kind of movie, you don’t really write the comedy. You have to write a movie that works emotionally, then you go back, and then it’s the fun part.”
Reynolds is proud of the film and says they brought something different to the MCU. “I don’t mean to sound esoteric or a little too sappy or emotional, but we really feel like the three of us [Hugh, Shawn, and Reynolds] loved each other into this moment. It’s rare that you have an experience that is peerless. The movie feels so complete and also different. It is a different type of movie for the MCU, which we’re all immensely proud of.”
The director Levy emphasises the reverence he and Reynolds have for the characters and stresses the importance of the writers remaining truthful to Wade and Logan.”We come to this with reverence and love of these characters. The North Star, for us, is what feels right for Wade and what feels honest for Logan. The magic thing that happens when you combine not only these two characters, but these two actors is a movie that has a lot of heart and a lot of emotion. I think the emotion of the movie might be one of its most subversive elements.”
Reynolds says at times, the dialogue reflects his real-life relationship with Jackman. “It was such a treat to write dialogue for Wolverine and Deadpool where we are straddling this line of it’s almost like it’s Ryan and Hugh speaking to each other as friends who have known each other for almost two decades and been through a lot together. He and I are very outwardly jokey, but most of our conversations are intense and emotional and about life and all kinds of stuff.”
Jackman says we will see a new side to Wolverine and looks forward to audiences seeing a particular monologue. “There is one monologue I get which has more countable words than I’ve used in an entire movie playing Wolverine. There are parts of the character that I’d pitched in different versions and tried to get across. I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s something that I’ve been scratching out, and these guys hit it. It was so thrilling being my age at the time of my life, with friends, playing the character, and having such joy. I feel so invigorated playing him again. I think fans are gonna see a whole different side, which I’m really, really excited about.”
Words – Cara O’Doherty