Ryan Reynolds might have taken most of the flak for Deadpool’s descent into muted madness in the third act of X-Men Origins: Wolverine – even if he’s since tried to blame Hugh Jackman for how the dismal comic book dud turned out – but he wasn’t the one doing the heavy lifting during the movie’s climactic action scene.
Instead, genre veteran and John Wick: Chapter 4 scene-stealer Scott Adkins was the one going toe-to-toe with the mutton-chopped protagonist after being hired to fill in for Reynolds when martial arts expertise was required. Thankfully for the actor, he doesn’t tend to get recognized for his contributions to Origins given that he was hidden away and utilized as little more than a stand-in, but he doesn’t harbor the same ill will for the movie that a lot of people do.
That being said, Adkins is more than self-effacing enough to know the final showdown and idiotic adaptation of the Merc with a Mouth was a massive mistake, but he still found it within his heart in an interview with ComicBook to admirably state that it could have gone a lot worse than it did.
“I know that I was part of the problem with the first, you know, version of Deadpool. But I was just doing as I was told… Ryan wasn’t even there by the time we shot the Deadpool stuff, I, I think he was off doing something else. When he saw what they were gonna do, he must have been really annoyed, really annoyed.
But I was just, like ‘Hang on a minute.’ Because I went over there thinking I was gonna be the full costume and everything. But there were other versions of that character that I was getting dressed up as and coming out by some terrible stuff as well. It could have been even worse. Um, not to throw anyone under the bus. Imagine Deadpool with a fish bowl on his head. Yeah. But listen, they were looking at a few ideas, and luckily they didn’t choose that one.”
It’s alarming to know that what we ended up with in X-Men Origins: Wolverine wasn’t even the worst possible outcome, which says more about 20th Century Fox and the film’s creative team more than anything else, even if Adkins ended up with the short end of the straw regardless by virtue of his mere involvement in such a widely-hated superhero blockbuster.
