Ryan Reynolds had to “let go” of the idea of being paid a huge amount for ‘Deadpool’.
Ryan Reynolds never thought Deadpool would be a success
The 47-year-old actor had always wanted to bring the Marvel Comics character to the screen and had been trying to do so for a decade by the time he finally managed to play Wade Wilson in 2016 but did not believe that it would ever become a success.
He told The New York Times: “When I finally got to make it, it had been almost 10 years at that point. No part of me was thinking when ‘Deadpool’ was finally greenlit that this would be a success.
“I even let go of getting paid to do the movie just to put it back on the screen: They wouldn’t allow my co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick on set, so I took the little salary I had left and paid them to be on set with me so we could form a de facto writers room.”
But the Hollywood star learned while on set of the film – which eventually grossed $782.6 million at the box office and spawned two sequels – that sometimes money can be the “enemy” of creativity, so by doing away with a focus on the financial side of things, he was able to hone in on the character.
He said: “It was a lesson in a couple of senses. I think one of the great enemies of creativity is too much time and money, and that movie had neither time nor money. It really fostered focusing on character over spectacle, which is a little harder to execute in a comic-book movie. I was just so invested in every micro-detail of it and I hadn’t felt like that in a long, long time. I remembered wanting to feel that more — not just on “Deadpool,” but on anything.
