Ryan Reynolds Recalls Giving His ‘Deadpool’ Salary to His Colleagues

While gearing up for the release of the highly-anticipated Deadpool & Wolverine, Ryan Reynolds is looking back on the tumultuous journey to getting his cult favorite character on the big screen with 2016’s Deadpool.

In an interview with The New York Times, Reynolds noted how the first of the film trilogy had been 10 years in the making, and an uphill battle that he was willing to self-fund at one point.

“No part of me was thinking when Deadpool was finally greenlit that this would be a success,” he told the outlet. “I even let go of getting paid to do the movie just to put it back on the screen. They wouldn’t allow my co-writers 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.”

“I think one of the great enemies of creativity is too much time and money, and that movie had neither time nor money,” he added. “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.”

Now two wildly successful movies down, Reynolds can celebrate that his sacrifice was worth it as he promotes the upcoming spin-off Deadpool and Wolverine — the first of the franchise’s films to be under the Marvel umbrella. 

In Deadpool & Wolverine, Hugh Jackman, 55, returns to the character he last played in 2017’s Logan. The new film marks Disney’s first R-rated offering since the studio’s acquisition of the characters from 20th Century Fox — which released the first two Deadpool films — in 2019. 

“In terms of the emotion, I’ve waited forever to do a movie with this guy, and I think he’s waited a long time to do something like this with me, so there are scenes where it’s pretty hard to distinguish between Wade Wilson talking to Logan and Ryan talking to Hugh,” Reynolds shared with NYT. “I love that, I get goose bumps even just talking about it.”

When ET spoke with Reynolds in April, he joked about his dueling bromances with Jackman and his Welcome to Wrexham counterpart, Rob McElhenney, with whom he co-owns the Wrexham Association Football Club. The Red Notice actor joked that it may have taken Jackman some time to understand he isn’t the only man in Reynolds’ life after McElhenney, 47, purchased the Welsh soccer team back in 2020. 

“Oh, he’s a very jealous person,” Reynolds joked of Jackman. “It’s a real proprietary sense of meaning in everything I do… [I’m] just Hugh’s little meat puppet.”

All jokes aside, Reynolds and director Shawn Levy both credit Jackman with providing the key element to bring the third Deadpool installment to the big screen. 

“We had been trying to craft a story for several months. We had some interesting approaches, but it never gelled. Literally within a day of Hugh joining this story, we knew what the movie was,” Levy recently told Variety. 

Deadpool & Wolverine hits theaters on July 26. For more on the movie, check out the links below. 

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