Deadpool & Wolverine director Shawn Levy on those spoiler surprises

NEW YORK – Though Canadian director Shawn Levy has spent the last several months promoting his superhero blockbuster Deadpool & Wolverine, there was so much he could not say until now.

“This conversation will be tantamount to therapy for me,” the 56-year-old joked as he signed on to a video call to discuss cameos and plot elements that had to be kept hidden until after the film’s huge opening weekend from July 25.

Though trailers sold the movie as a team-up between Ryan Reynolds’ meta mercenary Deadpool/Wade Wilson and Hugh Jackman’s surly mutant Wolverine/Logan, the starry supporting cast includes some big surprises, including Jennifer Garner as assassin Elektra, Wesley Snipes as vampire hunter Blade and Channing Tatum as card-tossing mutant Gambit.

The film’s multiverse-spanning shenanigans also allow the return of Chris Evans. He retired his Captain America character in Avengers: Endgame (2019) but, here, reprises Johnny Storm, the Fantastic Four character he played in 2005, when 20th Century Fox owned key pieces of the Marvel portfolio.

Levy said nearly all of those surprise cameos were hatched in Canadian actor Reynolds’ apartment, where much of Deadpool & Wolverine was conceived amid pie-in-the-sky brainstorming. Both had previously collaborated on action comedy Free Guy (2021) and sci-fi adventure The Adam Project (2022).

“It was the two of us acting scenes out, passing a laptop back and forth... It invariably led to one of us texting that actor and just asking.”

Ryan has said that you both had trouble cracking the story before Hugh agreed to come on board. Was there anything from those early, Wolverine-less versions that you kept?

A few disparate elements made it all the way through, and one of the bigger ones includes this notion of Wade going through a midlife malaise and selling used cars. This was a guy who had given up on his better self and was living a life of compromise.

That survived through the Wolverine iteration of this movie, as did the imperative of having Wade’s chosen family factor in.

And I remember (Paul) Wernick and (Rhett) Reese, who also co-wrote the previous Deadpool movies (2016 and 2018), pitching this idea of a Chris Evans misdirect very early: What if we could get Chris Evans and the audience thinks it’s Cap, but he’s actually coming back as Johnny Storm? It was such an A-plus idea that it survived every iteration of the story line.

Deadpool & Wolverine pulls a surprising amount from the Marvel series Loki (2021 to present), including the Time Variance Authority (TVA), an organisation that prunes errant timelines. Did the studio suggest using those elements?

We knew that the movie Logan (2017), James Mangold’s masterpiece, was sacrosanct, so we weren’t going to rewrite that particular history. Nor were we going to revive that iteration of Wolverine.

With no prodding from Marvel, we were aware that Loki – which Ryan and I had watched, I confess, sparingly at that time – used the TVA and this conceit of a bureaucratic organisation that oversees the multiverse. It was this wildly convenient device to incorporate Wolverine into our movie without changing the timeline of Logan.

When Hugh said he wanted in, how did that change or maybe even clarify the big idea of the movie?

Clarify is exactly the right word. When Hugh came on board, we instantly started thinking about the legacy of Logan, and that very same day, we had a strong sense that the movie itself should be about the theme of legacy.

We knew it would create a proper buddy-cop paradigm, but thematically, it opened up the whole notion that became a spinal theme. So many people have expressed surprise regarding the emotionality, both in the story itself and that Fox tribute reel that we created for the end credits, and it really all speaks to this idea of legacy.

In an early montage, we see several Wolverine variants, and one is played by British actor Henry Cavill, who portrayed Superman in the DC Extended Universe (2013 to 2023). What was the impetus behind that casting choice?

Can I please point out that Ryan brilliantly named Henry’s Logan “the Cavillrine”? In the case of Henry, it was not long after everything went down with DC and word came that Henry was being replaced as Superman.

Given that Deadpool is in constant conversation with culture, it felt like a great opportunity to first cast Henry in a part that he would kick a** at, but also to poke fun at that other comic book-founded movie studio and play with some self-awareness there.

He not only had that pumped-up muscular body, but kept that cigar lit and in his mouth for the entirety of the shoot day. I remember hearing the next day that he was sick to his stomach because he had been inhaling cigar smoke for eight hours straight, but never once did he waver.

Midway through the movie, we meet a band of resistance fighters culled from prior movies or even movies that didn’t happen. Beyond the initial jolt of recognition or surprise, what is the thematic reasoning behind picking these specific characters?

I want to point out that if all we were going for was the “shock and awe” moment, there were 50 other cameos we could have put in.

We tried to rigorously enforce discipline in ourselves by always coming back to that central theme: Who are characters in the Marvel lore who never got to put a capstone on their legacy? That led us to Elektra and Jennifer Garner. That led us to Wesley Snipes in a big way.

With the exception of Channing as Gambit, they all connect back to that central theme of legacy and a proper ending. We knew that we wanted to have some forgotten heroes and we had a list of dozens and dozens of characters.

Marvel movies often end in a way that sets up future films. Deadpool & Wolverine does not really do that, not even in the closing credits.

It was a founding principle of this movie, so fundamental to our intent that in early versions of the opening voice-over, Deadpool actually says, “Let me just say right now, this is a Marvel movie that isn’t a commercial for any other Marvel movies.”

The commitment to a self-contained, single story was bedrock for Ryan and me, and never once was there an ounce of pushback from Marvel. NYTIMES