Ryan Reynolds joined The Empire Film Podcast in May to discuss all things Deadpool 2. He discussed the after credits scenes; X-Force; Vaneesa & Deadpool’s deaths; Cable; the Juggernaut and a lot more. Have a look below at what the Deadpool star had to say.

Credits Scene – X-Men Origins Wolverine

We had a dick of a time trying to get the actual, raw footage though from X-Men Origins Wolverine. The movie was shot on film, it wasn’t shot on digital so it was harder to get, even though we were sitting there on the Fox lot. The exact piece of the movie we needed had been damaged. So we had to go to some backup that was in the middle of some vault somewhere in the middle of the United States and we ended up finally at the last second putting it into the movie. For me I was literally losing sleep over it though. I was thinking, oh my God, how are we gonna do this? Am I gonna have to call Hugh (Jackman) and ask him to shoot this chunk that looks exactly like a movie he’s already done? I can’t think of a worse hell for a human being to do then to go “why don’t you take this scene from a movie you did 10 years ago and re-create it exactly.” Ironically, my side was fine, the one shot we needed of him going “Wade?” as he’s looking at the bizarre (Deadpool) thing, we just didn’t have.

Credits Scene – Saving Vanessa & Killing Ryan Reynolds

The entire after credit sequence was initially conceived as a scene with Peter. The whole thing was going to be a scene thing with Peter, just because we loved Peter. Then at the last minute we huddled up and we thought, let’s get Peter in there. I think it was David Leitch’s idea, wouldn’t Wade somehow someway try to steal that time travel device and bring Vanessa back? I was like no, we can’t bring Vanessa back, that’s cheating! So David suggested that we go back and save Vanessa and then Rhett (Reese), Paul (Wernick) and I thought fine, if we’re going to go back and save Vanessa, let’s save Peter, let’s kill Origins Deadpool and let’s kill Ryan Reynolds. So we shot that in an afternoon, all the chunks of it.

Credits Scene – Saving Peter

I love that he just completely ignores this marquee cast that he could have saved with useful and wonderful superheroes. I always felt it was important to save Peter just because, in the helicopter before we jump out skydiving, I say to him “I’d never let anything happen to you sugar bear. I’m just saying this to impress the other guys.” I felt like that was a promise that Wade made early on in the movie and it was nagging him so he went back and got Peter. We couldn’t afford to bring the other guys back, they have to remain dead. One in particular would be very expensive.

X-Force

It was a totally inorganic way to create a scene. We needed a bridge between Deadpool getting out of prison and needing to go after Cable. Deadpool just got his ass kicked by Cable so you don’t want to just go right into chasing Cable on the convoy and having that fight with him, and that’s how it was originally written, and we just needed this breath of air in there. In the initial concepts of it, Wade decides to assemble this incredible team, we get up in a helicopter, we go up over the drop zone, we’re gonna jump in and then we actually land in a minefield. And just every single one of them one after another explodes, which is a really funny concept in theory. But why is there a fucking landmine? Where did the landmines come from? Who lands in a field of landmines? This isn’t Vietnam, this is an urban environment, a city environment! There’s no business for landmines to be there, so that idea was quickly struck down.

Brad Pitt as The Vanisher

It’s the power of just asking, just writing a letter. So I wrote Brad a letter saying, we have this fucking completely stupid role of this guy who is invisible and wordless, says nothing in the entire movie, he’s invisible. The only time we see him is 8 frames of footage when he’s electrocuted to death, suddenly and unexpectedly, and we think it would be really hilarious if that was the biggest movie star in the world. He thought it was funny and said he’d do it but do it for a latte. So I said I’ll bring you a Starbucks, he said great, and I said the franchise or just one individual cup of coffee? And he said one individual and I said thank you because the former I couldn’t do. So he came in, I think he shot for 7 minutes. We just did this secret little shoot with a skeleton crew on the fox lot way after we were into post production. He came in, gave his best Buster Keaton look as he’s getting electrocuted and there he was in the movie. We were all kind of walking on sunshine afterwards, how did that just happen? Brad Pitt just came in for free and gave us one look.

Deadpool’s Death

That is the short version. We had a version that just went on and on and on. We kept cutting to the different characters watching and eventually the characters faces go from empathy to just ‘please die, this is just ridiculous.’ We foreshadow the death at the beginning of the movie. At the beginning of the movie he says ‘Fuck Wolverine. The hairy motherfucker died in his movie, well guess what, I’m dying in this one too.’ When Deadpool dies in the third act of Deadpool 2, the music that’s playing is actually the Logan death music. It’s the exact same music that was used when Logan died on that very unfortunate tree branch. Most of this script was written pre-Logan and Avengers, none of those movies had come out yet. We always had planned on Wade having this epic and utterly stupid death scene at the end of the movie but we didn’t realize that it would resonate in that nice parallel path with Logan. So we actually ended up adding that voice-over at the beginning later on.

Vanessa’s Death

It was a really tough decision because we love that character. We were really worried (about a backlash). In order for Deadpool to function as Deadpool you need to put him in a position in which he’s not just the underdog but he’s really lost everything. The character is so outrageous and so obnoxious and so crazy. If he he just had everything and everything was in a good place in his life, you can’t really turn up the fun. The more pain Deadpool is in, the funnier Deadpool can be or more ridiculous or outlandish. So we really only had the one thing to take which was Vanessa. At one point, Wade and Vanessa were gonna’ have a baby and that was going to be seeding the tragedy that happened but that was just too much. We were a page and a half into that one and we were like, no no no, let’s not do that. So Vanessa unfortunately was the only catalyst we had to propel Deadpool into the depths of despair. Deadpool processes pain through the prism of humor so you need him to be in as much pain as possible for him to have the adventure that we need to have. Boy did we have disagreements at different times. In the end it felt like it was the best and only way to go.

Cable

Fuck me, have you ever gone through some of that? Just give yourself a Wikipedia of Cable right now and you’ll see what we were looking at it. It’s mind boggling, it’s utterly mind boggling. We took a Cable that we felt was the simplest, most accessible version of him and pumped him right into Josh Brolin. I love Cable, I love aspects of so many of his stories but you really had to cherry pick which ones you used for the film. Deadpool 2 is an introduction to Cable, we don’t really know that much about him, the idea that he’s actually a dead-man walking. He’s got this virus and it’s killing him slowly. There’s something in the future for him to play that Doc Holliday, Tombstone kind of version of a guy who’s really got nothing to lose. I like that he makes this decision to stick around and clean the shit up a bit and see if he can fix a few things before he leaves again.

Juggernaut

We couldn’t even afford a voice for Juggernaut, the voice is me. I just did it as a temp, as this Brooklyn brawler kind of voice that we modulated in post and cranked up and gave it all this bass and reverberation. We didn’t settle on that because it was quality, we settled on that because we just didn’t have anymore budget left for other actors to jump in.

X-Men Cast Cameo

It was always in the script. It was really just an availability thing. We were lucky enough that the X-Men Dark Phoenix film happened to be shooting in Montreal so they grabbed a plate of the cast. The cast – incredibly generous of them to do that because that was like a freebie for us and they had to probably get in a lot of makeup and different stuff to make that shot happen for us. It was something we wanted to include as a callback to Deadpool 1. (I did think that when I saw Nick Hoult in full Beast makeup.) I like to think that he had been shooting something else that day, it makes me sleep at night.

Black Tom Cassidy

Black Tom was just in the movie as a supervillain who has incredible powers and all sorts of stuff. It was the fucking studio that said you guys are over budget. So his whole story-line got trimmed way back and Jack Kesey who played him stayed on in the role.

Deadpool’s Baby Penis

That tiny penis was invented in a computer. In America we have the MPAA so I was thinking ‘oh god they’re going to come down on us because we’re showing this baby penis at some point’ which I don’t think you can do. But then my thought was, hold on a second, that’s not a baby penis, that’s Wade’s penis. Wade is a grown ass adult who just happens to have tiny legs and a little tiny penis.

– @WebbedMedia