The relatively recent announcement that Hugh Jackman would be reprising his role of Wolverine for the upcoming third “Deadpool” movie was met with a universally rapturous response.
It was also met with the assumption that it was franchise star Ryan Reynolds and the film’s director Shawn Levy were the ones who convinced Jackman to slip back on the claws.
Jackman and Reynolds have a long-standing friendship and social media back-and-forth and had co-starred in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” in variations of their characters, whilst Levy previously worked with Jackman on the well-regarded “Real Steel”.
Turns out though, the idea has been stirring around for years and never got any traction until Jackman one day decided he would be up for playing the role again and contacted Reynolds. After that, it was up to Reynolds to sell it to Marvel. He tells Collider:
“I don’t believe that I’m responsible for Hugh coming back. I always wanted Hugh to come back. My first meeting with Kevin Feige when Disney bought Fox years ago – maybe three years ago, or three and a half, four years ago, I’m not sure – I was about doing a movie with the two of us, a Deadpool Wolverine movie. And that was not possible at the time.
And then Hugh just happened to call at that perfect moment and express that he’d be interested in coming back and doing this one more time. And the contents of that conversation, I’ll let Hugh… answer that on his own. But he expressed interest in coming back, and then it was my job to take that to Kevin Feige one more time and sell it.”
He says adding Hugh Jackman to a movie was not a hard sell and “it’s an immediate and emphatic, unqualified yes” from the studio. That said, there are “a lot of moving parts” in terms of rights, studio ownership arrangement and a “lot of red tape” to sort through. Nevertheless:
“They did it. And I’m really grateful that they did it, because, for me, working with Hugh is a dream come true. But working with Logan and having Logan and Wade together in a movie is beyond any dream I would ever be audacious enough to have. So I’m really, really super f—ing excited to do this film.”
The Shawn Levy-directed film will premiere in theaters on November 8th 2024.
