Ryan Reynolds pokes fun at the towering Hugh Jackman with ‘Deadpool 3’ set photo praising ‘short king’ Wolverine

As hard as it seems to believe more than two decades after the fact, there were a lot of comic book readers unhappy when Hugh Jackman was announced to be playing Wolverine in Bryan Singer’s X-Men, for the sole reason that he’s roughly a foot taller than his comic book counterpart.

Naturally, it didn’t take long for everyone to change their tune when the actor quickly embedded himself as one of the superhero genre’s defining icons, but Ryan Reynolds hasn’t forgotten. Set photos from Deadpool 3 have made it perfectly clear that comic accuracy is the name of the game – with Jackman sporting Wolverine’s legendary yellow duds for the first time ever in live-action – but his co-star and frenemy hasn’t forgotten that the affable Aussie is a great deal more towering than the Marvel Comics icon.

Spend more than two minutes on social media and you’ll inevitably stumble across the phrase “short king” more than once, but having it come from the star and producer of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first-ever R-rated installment to describe a character that’s actually in the movie and played by somebody a great deal taller is about as self-referential as you’d expect from the mastermind behind the Merc with a Mouth.

A short king Jackman is not, but he’s more than made up for it with a stint as Wolverine that’ll have spanned almost a quarter of a century by the time the long-awaited Deadpool 3 slices and dices its way into theaters next summer.