Secure your fourth walls, everyone – Deadpool is back to break them all over again in Deadpool 2, a sequel that’s packed with as much meta humour, inventive swearing, and anarchic beats as the first film. There are surprises in there too, from A-list cameos and returning mutants, to some unexpectedly dark plot turns. We got into it all with Deadpool’s other alter-ego, Ryan Reynolds, on the Deadpool 2 Spoiler Special episode of the Empire Podcast – you can listen to that here, and keep on reading for 12 things we learned straight from the horse’s mouth. Not that we’re calling you a horse, Ryan.
WARNING: CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR DEADPOOL 2
1) The X-Men Origins: Wolverine clip nearly didn't make it in
Deadpool 2’s time-hopping mid-credits stings involve several increasingly-meta jumps: revisiting the start of Deadpool 2 to save Vanessa, before bumping off the botched depiction of Wade Wilson in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and finally killing off Ryan Reynolds himself as he surveys the Green Lantern script. But that middle segment almost didn't make it in, despite X-Men being a Fox property. "We had a dick of a time trying to get the actual raw footage," Reynolds said. "[X-Men Origins: Wolverine] was shot on film, it wasn't shot on digital, so it was harder to get. The exact piece of the movie we needed had been damaged on whatever the transfer was, so we had to go to a back-up which was in some vault somewhere in the middle of the United States. We ended up at the last second inputting it into the movie. I was literally losing sleep over it, though."
2) The X-Force massacre was going to be in a minefield
While Peter is eventually saved, and Domino is lucky enough to survive in the first place, the rest of Deadpool’s initial X-Force team (known during production as the ‘Fake X-Force’) meet a sticky end on their very first mission in a series of increasingly ridiculous deaths. They were always meant to die, but the first draft originally saw everyone blow up after landing in a minefield. “Every single one of them, one after another, explodes,” said Reynolds. “Which is a really funny concept in theory, but like why is there a fucking landmine? Where did the landmines come from? Who lands in a field of landmines? This isn't Vietnam, this is a city environment. There's no business for landmines to be there. So that idea was quickly struck down.”
3) The credits sting was initially going to be all about Peter
The other character Deadpool saves during the credits is the X-Force’s most valued member, Peter. And he was originally going to be the focus of the whole sequence. "We loved Rob Delaney's character,” said Reynolds, adding: “I love that [Deadpool] just completely ignores this marquee cast [the X-Force] that he could have saved, with useful and wonderful superheroes. I always felt it was important to save Peter, just because in the helicopter before we jump out skydiving I say to him, 'I'd never let anything happen to you, Sugar Bear'. I felt like that was a promise Wade made early on in the movie and it was nagging him, so he went back and got Peter. We can't afford half the other guys to bring them back, they have to remain dead. One in particular would be very expensive.”
4) The Vanisher cameo happened in exchange for a latte
How do you get one of the world’s most famous actors – Sir Brad of Pitt – to be in your movie? Well, you just ask him. But it helps if you’re already friends, and if the director of your film used to be his stunt double. “I wrote Brad a letter saying, look we have this fucking completely stupid role of this guy who's invisible and wordless, says nothing in the entire movie, he's invisible, we all jump out of an aeroplane and the only time we see him is eight frames of footage when he's electrocuted to death, suddenly and quite unexpectedly. And we think it would be really hilarious if that was the biggest movie star in the world,” Reynolds recalls. “He just thought that was funny and said, 'I'll do it for a latte'. I said, 'I'll bring you a Starbucks.'”
The scene was shot during post-production, with Pitt on set for a grand total of seven minutes on the Fox lot. “He came in and gave us his best Buster Keaton look as he's getting electrocuted. And there he was in the movie."
5) The drawn-out Deadpool death was Python-inspired...
True to his word at the start of the film, Deadpool does indeed die in the final act – but it takes him a while to get there. If you thought Wade’s protracted death scene where he just can’t seem to slip away felt Python-esque, that was in the intention. "It was inspired by Monty Python," Reynolds confirmed. "That is the short version [of his death]. We had a version that just went on and on and on, we kept cutting to the different characters watching and eventually their faces go from empathy to ‘just please die, this is ridiculous’."
6) ...and it used Logan's death music
And yes, if that music seemed familiar and made unexpected tears suddenly leak from your eyes, that's because it's the very same tune that soundtracked Wolverine's final moments in Logan. "We were all very nervous, because we really had to go ask [Logan director James] Mangold if he would give us this music. He seemed to get a chuckle out of it and was like, no problem."
7) Ryan Reynolds kept the Logan music box
Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine swan-song is invoked right at the start of Deadpool 2, as Wade stares at a music box depicting Logan’s tragic end. Hopefully it’ll become a piece of official merchandise in the future, and the one in the shoot now belongs to Reynolds. “It was a remarkable effort by our props department,” he said. “It makes me laugh every time I turn it on.”
8) The decision to kill Vanessa wasn't easily reached
The film kicks off with a plot development that’s already proved controversial – the death of Wade’s girlfriend Vanessa. It’s a surprisingly dark choice, and has been accused of falling under the maligned comic book trope of ‘fridging’: the death of a female character in service of damaging and propelling the male hero into action. Agree with the choice or not, it’s one that Reynolds claims was not made easily.
“It was a really tough decision, because we love that character and we love [Morena Baccarin],” he said. “We were really worried about that. In order for Deadpool to function like Deadpool, you need to to put him in a position in which he's not just the underdog, but that he's really lost everything. The character's so outrageous and so obnoxious and so crazy that if he had everything, everything was in a good place in his life, you can't really turn up the fun. The more pain Deadpool's in, the funnier Deadpool can be, or the more ridiculous Deadpool can be, or outlandish. So we really only had the one thing to take, and that was Vanessa. It was something we agonised over forever.”
He added: “Vanessa was kind of unfortunately the only catalyst we had to propel Deadpool into the depths of despair. It was definitely something we went back and forth on, and boy, we had disagreements at different times.”
9) Wade and Vanessa could have been parents before her death
Before Vanessa’s untimely death, her and Wade decide it’s time to have a kid. In one early script draft the pair had already had a baby before Vanessa dies. "At one point Wade and Vanessa were going to have a baby and that was going to be seeding the tragedy that happens, and that was just too much,” Reynolds revealed. “We were a page and a half into that version, we were like ‘nope, no no no’."
10) Ryan Reynolds is the voice of Juggernaut
Juggernaut is back (and thankfully Vinnie Jones isn’t) after making his big-screen debut in X-Men: The Last Stand. This time the character is fully rendered in CG, and his voice comes from an unexpected source. "As with every movie you want to finish on budget and on time, which we did, but barely – so we couldn't even afford a voice for Juggernaut. The voice for Juggernaut is me,” Reynolds admitted. “I just did it as a kind of temp, it was this sort of Brooklyn brawler voice that we modulated in post, and cranked up and gave it all this bass and reverberation. We didn't settle on that just because it was quality, we settled on that because we just didn't have any more budget left for other actors to jump in."
11) The X-Men shot was filmed on the Dark Phoenix set
Professor X and his mutant group make a one-shot cameo in the film’s X-Mansion sequence, including Nicholas Hoult in full Beast-mode and James McAvoy in his bald cap. The shot was done in Montreal during the filming of X-Men: Apocalypse sequel Dark Phoenix. “[It’s] incredibly generous of them to do that, because that's kind of a freebie for us,” said Reynolds. “They had to probably get into a lot of make-up and different stuff to make that shot happen for us."
12) Black Tom was originally going to be a bigger part
The nefarious Black Tom is largely a punchline to a running joke in Deadpool 2, but in the comics he’s a fully-fledged supervillain. The character was meant to have a bigger role in the film, but was cut down for monetary reasons. Jack Kesy, who had already signed on for the part, decided to stay in the role even after it was significantly reduced. “It was the fucking studio who said, you guys are over budget, you can't afford this whole... so his whole storyline got trimmed way back,” Reynolds explained.
Deadpool 2 is out now in cinemas. Listen to the Deadpool 2 Spoiler Special episode of the Empire Podcast here.
Pick up the Deadpool 2 Talking Cover edition of Empire’s Summer 2018 issue here – talk to the Merc With a Mouth, and he’ll talk back.