Ryan Reynolds had already been trying to make a Deadpool movie for five years before he first appeared as the character in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and it would be a further seven years after that before the Merc with a Mouth finally made his solo debut. After both installments went on to become the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever made, it seemed incredible that the studio had remained reluctant to give the project the green light for so long.
A perfect marriage of actor and character, Wade Wilson is a heightened extension of Reynolds’ real-life personality, with the actor’s social media presence alone more than enough to showcase the same razor-sharp wit, irreverent sense of humor and self-effacing attitude that personifies Deadpool. The 43 year-old’s love for the foul-mouthed assassin is evident, but it appears that he’s just as fond of the upcoming Free Guy.
Not only did Reynolds say that shooting Shawn Levy’s blockbuster action comedy was the most fun he’s ever had on set, but he also claims that it’ll be the best movie he’s ever been in. Doubling down on those sentiments in a recent interview, the Detective Pikachu star explained how he felt much the same about Free Guy as he did with Deadpool, without the hassle of spending over a decade trying to force it through development.
“I love the world. I love marketing. So I also love the idea that you get to introduce people to a new world and Shawn and I have been talking about it, that it’s just so fun to do something new, something that is quite literally based on absolutely nothing. So I love the process of acquainting an audience with this new property or this new idea. And it’s big. The scale is big. And I think it’s appealing to a huge audience. Just the good, old-fashioned reason that I want to do it is it’s something I want to see, something I just am dying to see. I read the script and we all did a ton of work on the script, but there was such a promise there of something new and something really special. It’s not unlike how I grabbed onto Deadpool. I just felt like there was a reason that this needed to exist. And I felt the same way about Free City.”
As one of the biggest and most popular movie stars on the planet, Reynolds doesn’t tend to find his ideas getting rejected anymore given his status, but let’s hope that Free Guy lives up to the continued hype from the leading man, especially when it’s one of 2020’s few remaining high-profile releases scheduled to hit theaters in December.
