Deadpool & Wolverine is chock full of surprising and fun character returns from throughout the history of Marvel’s movies. But one actor who said “no” to returning — maybe the only one? Robert Downey Jr., and it’s all because of his secret role as Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars.
The news comes via Indiewire, in a reliable excellent interview from Mike Ryan with Deadpool & Wolverine co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, so do go read the whole thing. But the surprising news is that the original version of the scene in the film where Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) interviews for the Avengers with Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) was written for Happy — and Tony Stark.
“We had wanted him to do a cameo,” Wernick explained. “We had written that scene [to start] with Happy and Downey… Behind the scenes, we didn’t know about the Doctor Doom. And there’s no way he was going to do both. And then we said, ‘Oh, Downey doesn’t say ‘no’ to Ryan Reynolds, does he? No one says no to Ryan Reynolds.’ And Ryan gave him the hard press. We wrote scenes, and Downey read the scenes, but what we didn’t know behind the scenes was this Doctor Doom thing.”
The writers go on to explain that the scene played out similarly to what we saw on screen, with Deadpool desperately trying to join the Avengers — only to be gently let down. In this case, by Happy and Tony, but in the finished film by Happy, solo.
As a little capper on this, though, there was an even earlier version of the scene that included not just Happy Hogan and Tony Stark, but all the Avengers — and Peter (Rob Delaney).
“Wade was rejected and then he dressed all the Avengers down in a way only Deadpool could do,” Wernick recalled.
In the scene — which again, was never scripted, Deadpool would have tried to pick up Thor’s hammer (while Peter casually picked it up in the background) and tried to get Captain America to swear. “He was going to get mad and basically attack each one of them in a vicious kind of way,” added Reese.
Like I noted earlier, go read the full interview. But one other surprising bit is that Reese and Wernick get closer to revealing who originally leaked test footage of Reynolds as Deadpool years ago, eventually leading to the movie getting picked up. Though they won’t reveal the names, they do explain it was neither of them and wasn’t Reynolds either. However, the writer duo explains they were friends of theirs, there are two of them, and (perhaps joking about this last part), are brothers. Start your speculation engines anew, folks!
Deadpool & Wolverine is now in theaters.