Deadpool was the hottest superhero movie of 2012, right up until it wasn’t. A toned-down version of the cult Marvel character had appeared in the stodgy X-Men Origins: Wolverine, played by Ryan Reynolds, but the proposed standalone movie, scripted by the writers of Zombieland, promised to be faithful to the source material: violent, sexy, nutty. Who wouldn’t want to see the adventures of a motormouth mercenary who gets aroused by chimichangas, katanas and Bea Arthur? No envelope would go unpushed, or unlicked. The in-demand Reynolds was signed up and visual effects specialist Tim Miller was announced as director.



Then: ring sting. Green Lantern, Martin Campbell’s 2011 blockbuster that was supposed to rubber-stamp Reynolds as a franchise-leading superhero, flopped hard. The strapping RyRey was suddenly comic-book Kryptonite. Panicky studio executives pulled the plug. Deadpool was dead.

For Miller, preparing to make his transition to feature directing after years running his own successful VFX studio, watching his dream project implode was some majorly bad juju. “I was so disappointed when we couldn’t do it five years ago,” he says. “I was thinking: ‘These people don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.’ I was angry and traumatised. But with hindsight, I can see why now is a much better time. Back then it perhaps hadn’t reached the point where audiences were familiar enough with the genre that we could riff on it. The public wasn’t really ready.”

Warning: trailer contains explicit content

A small percentage of scuttled movies get retooled or rebooted. With Deadpool, it was more like defibrillation. A sizzle reel that Miller created in 2011 – a spandex ballet of Reynolds, in a skin-tight red costume, quipping and killing his way through a carload of heavies – leaked in summer 2014. The online response was so enthusiastic that Deadpool abruptly had traction again. Executives didn’t even question how the footage had escaped. (Miller, while denying he had any responsibility for the leak, does seem tickled that his movie’s origin story will always have a certain outlaw element.) Within weeks of the footage appearing online, Miller was back in production, with the script dusted off and Reynolds reattached.

During a break from editing, Miller, an X-Men superfan who has been collecting comics since 1980, sounds a little tired and a lot less guarded than your average Hollywood interviewee. “I’ve always had a reputation in my small little industry for being honest, but a little dickish, too,” he says. “Most effects companies, they print up company T-shirts with mottos like ‘Excellence in visual imagery’ or something like that. Our first studio T-shirt said ‘Fuck you’ on the back. The second year of our company, we changed it to ‘Fuck everybody’. So Deadpool was always the perfect project for me.”

Tim Miller and Reynolds. Photograph: Joe Lederer

“A little dickish” could be on Deadpool’s business cards. Not long after his first appearance in 1991, Deadpool became the Marvel universe’s cheerfully obnoxious court jester, infuriating both heroes and villains with a stream of pop-culture references and constant fourth-wall breaking. There is a teardrop of tragedy behind the red face mask, teased out in the movie in the relationship between loyal soldier Wade Wilson and his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). Wade only becomes Deadpool to combat his terminal cancer, undergoing experimental superhero surgery organised by shady powerbroker Ajax (Ed Skrein). The treatments result in accelerated internal super-healing, making the so-called Merc With A Mouth essentially unkillable, though Deadpool’s face and body are left horribly scarred and covered with lesions (“Like a cross between Ryan Reynolds and a Shar-Pei,” quipped the character, with unexpected clairvoyance, in a 2004 issue).

I never saw anyone else apart from Ryan. In real life, he pretty much is Deadpool Tim Miller

For years, Ryan Reynolds has been acting in romcoms and thrillers as if sarcasm is his innate superpower, and with his lean athleticism – more radbod than dadbod – he bears more than a passing physical resemblance to the character. Did Miller ever imagine his movie happening without him? “That question came up,” he says. “But I just never saw anyone else apart from Ryan. In real life, he pretty much is Deadpool. I couldn’t think of anyone else who had the combination of good looks, athleticism, dramatic chops – because he’s a great dramatic actor – and, more importantly, comedy on top. He’s got that same smart, offbeat sense of humour. He’s fucking raunchy.”

While Deadpool is motivated to start slicing up bad guys when his girlfriend is kidnapped by Ajax, Miller described him as “pansexual” late last year, which generated some heated debate about whether Deadpool was the first gay superhero to make it to the screen. “I think that was a result of me not being that experienced with the way that the media worked,” says Miller. “We really explore his relationship with Vanessa in the movie but there’s nothing that says he wouldn’t explore other relationships. In my mind, he’s always been pansexual and I wanted to be true to the way he is in the comics.”

Reynolds and Morena Baccarin. Photograph: REX

More complex backstories like these mean that Deadpool has carved a path into distinctly more adult territory. The raunch, the sexual unstereotypes – it’s certainly divergent from the current cookie-cutter production line of comic-book blockbusters. For Gina Carano, the fierce former MMA fighter turned fluid, convincing action star, the film also offered something different. Carano cracked heads in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire and Fast & Furious 6, but playing Angel Dust – Ajax’s near-mute, all-business enforcer with swept-up hair and piercing eyes – has taken her to a new level of outsized villainy. She embraced the chance to play “one of the strongest characters in a comic-book movie”, she says. “I’ve maybe shied away from that kind of appearance in the past so to know that the whole point of Angel Dust was to be this formidable presence made me accept it and own it a bit more.”

When she was a pro fighter, Carano had to assess the physical condition of her opponents in the ring with just a glance. What did she make of Reynolds and Skrein? “They worked their butts off to look the way they do in their fight scenes,” she says. “There will be no shading of their abs. I actually think this movie is going to be fascinating for women because they get to see two guys who genuinely look that good. The eye candy is the men not the women. We’ve got a little Magic Mike fight scene that I think people are going to love.”

As well as getting to grips with CGI-assisted acting, Deadpool was also Carano’s first experience of comedy. “It’s refreshing,” she says. “All those jokes we make when we watch movies – cue the shirtless guy scene, cue the naked girl scene – Deadpool makes fun of all of it, he’s just calling it out all the time. I think it brings the audience into the movie and the character more than they ever have before. He’s a next-level, more modern-day superhero.” When pressed, she will admit that the cocktail of ultraviolence and playground humour might not be for everyone. “I don’t think my mom is going to be able to watch it,” she admits.

Gina Carrano. Photograph: Joe Lederer

Still, in a year groaning with star-jammed comic-book movies – including Captain America: Civil War, Batman v Superman and X-Men Apocalypse – the squirrelly Deadpool risks being squeezed out. “We shot on a third of the budget of most superhero movies but, y’know, you just make it happen,” says Miller. The Merc With A Mouth does have the advantage of being first out of the gate in 2016, crucially arriving ahead of Suicide Squad, DC’s broadly similar mob of volatile antiheroes. Where does Miller think Deadpool slots into such a crowded field?

“Deadpool’s story is very personal. He’s not the guy fighting against someone who’s trying to take over the world; he’s the guy taking down the crack dealers in the street. I think there’s a place for that up against the bigger, shinier X-Men scenes. Don’t get me wrong, I love those things, too, but I think there’s room for both. Just like Blazing Saddles is a great western and so is Unforgiven. I don’t think the genre should be limited to one tone.”

We shot on a third of the budget of most superhero movies Tim Miller

Comic-book movies that have enthusiastically embraced sex and/or violence have traditionally been a hard sell. Will Smith’s Hancock, about a boozy, misanthropic Superman analogue, failed to take flight, while even the widely admired Dredd, acknowledged by fans as being supremely faithful to the 2000AD source material, couldn’t muster a sequel.

Producer Simon Kinberg, currently overseeing the continued expansion of the X-Men movie universe, has likened Deadpool to Borat, a confrontational outlier that surprised audiences to become a genuine box-office smash. Conversely, it might crash and burn like Borat follow-up Brüno. But it still feels like a breath of transgressive fresh air to see a headline hero shoot three baddies through the head with the same bullet while bopping to Salt-N-Pepa. (The soundtrack also contains DMX, Wham! and Neal Sedaka.)

“We’re going in and out of comedy and action at the drop of a hat,” says Miller. “It’s tricky but I think it works. That’s one of the first things Simon Kinberg said when he saw the movie; he said: ‘Dude, fuck, it’s tonally all over the place, but it works. I’m not sure why it works, but it works.’”

Deadpool is in cinemas on 10 Feb