Ryan Reynolds discusses his desire to bring Captain America back as Johnny Storm in the new Marvel movie.
Ryan Reynolds was aware that it would be difficult to get Chris Evans to feature in Deadpool & Wolverine. Reynolds reasoned that it wouldn’t hurt to give the Captain America part a little more significance than a cameo, even though the Marvel regular wouldn’t be returning in his iconic role. Evans agreed when he completed that, but with one little qualification.
On the director’s commentary for Deadpool & Wolverine, which is available digitally today, Reynolds and co-writer/director Shawn Levy talked about the film’s surprise end-credits scene. The scene shows that Johnny Storm, played by Evans, uttered everything that Deadpool says he said regarding Cassandra Nova. And Evans returned because of the precise placement of that profanity-filled remark.
“Well, at the risk of being redundant with my theme of necessity being the mother of invention, I desperately wanted Chris to do this, to play the Human Torch in this film. But not as a favor,” Reynolds said. “I wanted to find a way to get him to say ‘Yes’ because it was just a part he couldn’t resist. So the tag at the end of this movie is a scene that I think I wrote in five minutes. And part of it was just to see if he would see the sequence or the scene and say ‘Yes’ on its merits alone, but also I wasn’t sure if the scene would even work. And he read the scene and then called me back and said, ‘I’ll do it as long as that end credits tag is in this movie.’ And that’s when I knew that homie don’t fuck around. He was ready to let it fly.”
Talk about Evans’s instincts being Marvel. He was aware that having a sequence in the end credits would thrill fans, but he also realised that him just sitting there and cursing would be the ultimate Deadpool mockery of that. So he was all in.
“I said to Chris ‘We have we could have prompters or huge cue cards, whatever you want, anything’ and he’s just like ‘Screw that dude. I’m coming ready to go,’” Reynolds said. “I think we only shot this two or three times. It was a remarkable and a side to him I don’t think we’ve ever seen, which I love.”
