‘It Sucks to Be Naked All the Time’: On the Set of ‘Deadpool,’ the Most Outrageous Superhero Film Ever

It’s a cold, rainy, and thoroughly miserable early spring day in the industrial outskirts of Vancouver, but Ryan Reynolds couldn’t be happier.
The 39-year-old actor is finally shooting Deadpool, the wild-card superhero film that the quick-witted, effortlessly upbeat star has been trying to get made in some form for more than a decade. Now, he’s finally donning the foul-mouthed antihero’s red-and-black threads — and in his hometown, no less. “He’s totally getting a kickback,” director Tim Miller cracks about the production’s northwest Canadian location. “Big-time kickback,” Reynolds responds. “[I see] my menacing mother every Sunday. That’s the kickback.”

Banter about Reynolds’ “very hot” mom ensues, apropos to the film he and his director have been shooting for nearly two months now. Deadpool, Marvel’s “Merc With a Mouth,” is a notoriously crude crimefighter, one with a surprisingly sinister background: Born Wade Wilson, he was terminally ill until shady government experiments held by Weapon X — the shifty government research project — endowed him with super-strength and accelerated healing powers.

Deadpool’s naughty nature is one of the reasons the character, first introduced as a villain by Rob Liefield and Fabian Nicieza in 1991’s New Mutants #98, faced such a formidable paddle to the big screen. Though there were IRL hold-ups, as well, including the mishandling of the character in the 2009 mulligan X-Men Origins: Wolverine — which marked the first time Reynolds donned Deadpool gear — and 2011’s Green Lantern, the movie that seemingly stripped away the actor’s big-screen superhero powers for good.

But after test footage of a scene Miller and Reynolds shot in 2012 leaked onto the ‘net and floored fanboys and girls, the film got fast-tracked by Fox (the scene, in which Deadpool drops through the hood of an SUV and merrily dismantles its henchmen, quickly captured the character’s devil-may-care vibe). Better yet, Miller and Reynolds — along with X-Men magic maker/producer maker Simon Kinberg and Zombieland writing duo Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick — were given as free a reign as you’ll find in Hollywood to not just make a Deadpool movie, but make a faithful Deadpool movie. Meaning that it’s going to be filthy, comical, hyper-violent fun. And it’s going to be rated R — a rarity for comic-book movies, especially in the post-Iron Man age.

Getting there, however, required making six years of script tweaks, finding Deadpool’s new place in the growing X-Men universe, and determining just how crazy they would paint Marvel’s loosest cannon in his first standalone film. Here are 10 tidbits we picked up visiting the movie’s set:

1. Reynolds almost gave up on Deadpool, and Green Lantern didn’t do him any favors.

Considering the decade-plus long history of the film’s development process — the project was first announced by Marvel in 2000, and Reynolds, along with his Blade: Trinity writer-director David S. Goyer, came onboard in 2004 — there were certainly moments when the light at the end of the tunnel seemed fully dimmed. “It was pretty faint after Green Lantern,” Reynolds says about his 2011 DC Comics bust.

But that was only one setback. There was also New Line putting the movie in turnaround in 2005, as well as unsuccessful attempts at luring directors like Robert Rodriguez. Even more disastrous was the ill-conceived X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), in which Deadpool was introduced, then had his mouth sewn shut and was decapitated, much to the fury of his fanbase. That fate seemed to finally kill any chances of a Deadpool solo adventure. “There was a time when I thought, 'I just gotta let it go,’” Reynolds admits. “It was like the worst relationship I’d ever been in. It was on-off, on-off, you know?”

This Deadpool will exist within the Marvel and Fox’s X-Men shared universe, so it does have to acknowledge the events of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, even if it does so begrudgingly. “Obviously, I think it’s pretty well known that they f–ked up Deadpool and Wolverine,” Wernick says. And the film itself even manages to get a dig in at Green Lantern, too. “Please don’t make the supersuit green, or animated” Deadpool tells government agents in the trailer, a moment that had Comic-Con audiences howling.