Hugh Jackman recently appeared on ‘The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon’ and recalled how he joined the ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ cast. Jackman shared that he had the idea of reprising his role as Wolverine in the film while driving in New York in 2022:
“So, I’m driving down there, and I was like, ‘What do you want to do?’ It was in my head. The kids had their headphones, and I was like, ‘What do you want to do? What do you want to do?’ I went, [Gasps] ‘I want to do ‘Deadpool & Wolverine.”’ Sorry, it was ‘Wolverine-Deadpool’ when I was thinking about it. But I just thought, ‘I really want to do it.’”
He went on:
“I pulled over, and I rang Ryan [Reynolds], and I said, ‘Dude, I don’t know where you’re at. I know you’re shooting. I think you’re getting ready to shoot, but please tell me we can do this movie.’ And he said, ‘Are you okay? You’re ringing me. What? No one rings on the phone anymore. They text. What’s up?’ But anyway, he said, ‘Yes,’ and thankfully, Feige and everyone at Marvel and Disney said yes, too.”
When Fallon asked if Wolverine wasn’t in the early script, the actor said:
“No, no. They had all these other things. I don’t even want to think about it. But they had all these other things.”
The Film Was Planned As A Road Trip With Deadpool
‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ brought back Jackman and Aaron Stanford from Fox’s X-Men series and introduced new Marvel characters, including Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) to the MCU. Ryan Reynolds revealed to Entertainment Weekly earlier this year that the initial plans for the film were entirely different, though:
“Literally, it was a $5 or $6 million budget with no special effects. It was just a talkie-talkie road trip with me and [Karan Soni’s] Dopinder and some of the things we collected and saw along the way. It wasn’t meant to be an event movie. If we’re on our way to Point C, it was meant to just get us to Point B. That was the weirdest one. I liked it. I thought it was kind of fun.”
Jackman’s decision to come back from retirement changed the direction to a multiversal adventure involving the TVA. Shawn Levy directed the story and later shared about the new script:
“Everything changed radically on the day that Hugh called Ryan. We had been workshopping a lot of ideas about possible stories for a third ‘Deadpool’ movie. Those were story ideas that were more sequelly to the first two ‘Deadpools,’ but none of them imagined such a seismic shift. I can safely say that the story completely changed and, in fact, came to us very, very quickly starting that day.”
‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ will see release on July 26.
