Ryan Reynolds brings the banter as the masked mercenary motormouth

Meet Deadpool, the first 'hard-R' rated superhero

Would the person who leaked 2011 test footage of Deadpool—thereby throwing fans into a frenzy and triggering a long-awaited green light for the project—please stand up? Ryan Reynolds wants to kiss you. “And not just a little kiss,” he purrs, “but full on the mouth, sloppy, with tongue, for two straight minutes on live television, without commercial interruption. And then I’ll buy you dinner at Red Lobster, at least, and dessert.”

Reynolds is channeling his character—the libertine, sarcastic motormouth Wade Wilson a.k.a. Deadpool—but he’s also speaking from the heart. The actor has wanted to play Marvel’s baddest boy for more than a decade. He appeared as a sanitized version of the role in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine (two years before his starring turn in the ill-fated Green Lantern), but this project aims to mimic the comic’s violent, obscene, spicy, funny, fourth-wall-breaking tone, and to let Reynolds and company push the film (out Feb. 12) way past PG-13.

“Deadpool is a hard R,” assures producer Simon Kinberg (X-Men: Days of Future Past). “It’s graphic. Nothing is taboo. You either commit to a truly outrageous boundary-pushing kind of movie or you don’t.”

First-time director Tim Miller, who designed the arresting open credits sequence for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, cites a different David Fincher movie as a touchstone: “I felt Fight Club and Tyler Durden were good corollaries,” he says. “We are in strip clubs and dive bars and crappy apartments and far away from the shiny X-Men world.”