Deadpool & Wolverine has been a long time coming, stretching back to when Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman first crossed paths while making 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
In that film, Reynolds played a very different version of Deadpool than he would play in the later movies — without the famous red suit or even more signature wisecracking — while Jackman was already several films into the X-Men franchise. Though the 2009 project wasn’t a critical success, the two actors say they have zero regrets about it, as Reynolds notes, “it’s given birth to this incredible friendship.”
“That movie, a lot of people don’t realize, was shot in the middle of a writers strike, one of the hardest ways to shoot a film you could ever imagine,” Reynolds told The Hollywood Reporter at the Deadpool & Wolverine premiere in New York on Monday. Gesturing to Jackman standing beside him, he continued, “I think the perseverance that you showed and everybody else — also I got to watch the most classy, kind, intelligent, wickedly disciplined movie star welcome me onto a set and I got to have that behavior modeled for me at a pretty formative time in my life and I’m always grateful to Hugh for that.”
The movie serves as Jackman’s return to the Wolverine role after saying goodbye in 2017’s Logan, but Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige promised there won’t be any drop-off in the fan-favorite character. “I think when people see this movie, it won’t feel like somebody returning from retirement, it will feel like somebody at the top of their game,” Feige said.
Deadpool & Wolverine also marks the first R-rated feature in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as director Shawn Levy admitted, “We kept waiting for pushback. We would turn in drafts of the script, we would turn in cuts of the movie, and we waited for what we thought was the inevitable Disney or Marvel request to tone it down; those requests never came. We had absolute creative freedom.”
Feige explained that the two previous Deadpool movies — the first released in 2016 and second in 2018 — were rated R and when Disney acquired the property from Fox, the studio “had been very clear saying they were R-rated before, let this one be R-rated.” He added, “Ryan is the best arbiter of that. Ryan knows where the line is and he goes right up to it and pulls himself back. But the line is far out there.”
The MCU boss also weighed in on whether this would open the door to more R-rated Marvel content in the future, saying, “I think it is when appropriate, sure. It was entirely appropriate for Deadpool — it would have been inappropriate for it to not be R, and if we encounter a character like that, there are a few I can think of where that’s in the DNA of the character and we’ll do that.”
Deadpool & Wolverine hits theaters on Friday.
Garrett Vogel contributed to this report.