Hugh Jackman on bringing back Wolverine and Deadpool mate Ryan Reynolds’ Aussie nickname
After nine movies, the Aussie actor announced he was done playing the superhero, but he reveals what helped him change his mind. See the video.
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When Hugh Jackman watched the first Deadpool movie in 2016 – he couldn’t help but feel that he’d left the superhero party just a little too soon. Three days too soon to be precise.
His good mate Ryan Reynolds had first played a somewhat bastardised version of Deadpool in Jackman’s Sydney shot 2009 star vehicle X-Men Origins: Wolverine and had battled for a decade afterwards to bring to the screen the version of the masked, motormouth assassin that he’d loved from the Marvel comics.
As Jackman sat with his family in a private screening organised by Reynolds ahead of the release of what became a billion-dollar smash, he saw reference after reference not just to Wolverine, but to him personally. And about 15 minutes in, an idea began to form in Jackman’s head about what the two characters and the two friends could do together.
The only problem was that just three days earlier, he’d announced that he would play the metal-clawed mutant for the ninth and last time in Logan and at the time he “meant it with every bone of my body”.
“All I kept seeing was Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy from 48 Hours,” says Jackman of the possible team-up he envisaged between the fourth-wall-breaking, fast-talking Deadpool and the rage-fuelled, taciturn Wolverine.
“So, I will be totally honest, there was a part of me going ‘I might have spoken a little bit too soon’. But I was like ‘but, I have said it so I have to follow through’ and it took me five or six years before finally I went ‘all right’.”
Movie history records that both Deadpool and its 2018 sequel became huge critical and commercial hits, as was 2017’s Logan, in which Jackman killed off Wolverine in fitting and poignant fashion. At the time, Jackman revealed that a chat at a party with comedy great Jerry Seinfeld has convinced him that going out on top was the right thing to do but somewhere at the back of his mind remained some unfinished business.
Fast forward five years and Jackman was having a deep and meaningful with his children, Oscar and Ava, who were on the brink of adulthood and pondering the future.
“I had been talking to my kids … about ‘what do you want to do with your life? What is it you want to do if you could do anything?
“And I thought I should ask that of myself: if I could do anything – and I am super lucky in that in many ways I can ask myself that question – what would it be? And three things came to into my head. I want to build my own little house, because I can’t do anything and I am the most unhandy guy on the planet, I want to learn a new instrument and then I want to do Deadpool and Wolverine.”
So on August 14, 2022, while on holidays, he pulled over his car, called Reynolds and left a long and rambling message, the basic gist of which was ‘I’m in’. As luck would have it, Jackman’s epiphany couldn’t have come at a better time. Reynolds and their mutual friend Shawn Levy, who had directed Jackman in Real Steel, were struggling to come up with an idea for a third Deadpool movie, which was made more challenging by the fact that Deadpool now existed in the same universe as Iron Man, Thor and the Hulk after Disney had bought out 20th Century Fox, which was also home to the X-Men.
As it happened, Reynolds and Levy, were about to have a conversation with Marvel boss Kevin Feige to admit defeat for now when Jackman’s call changed the game. The Aussie A-lister hadn’t quite missed the boat as he feared, but it was certainly getting ready to pull away from the jetty.
“I guess it was kind of a what if moment and that’s when it became super, super clear to me,” says Jackman of his revelation. “I had been flirting with it and then put it to the side and I was terrified that I had missed the boat. Ryan and I are good friends so I knew that he was getting ready to shoot but I wasn’t sure where he was at and I thought if he was shooting now then this is going to be years down the track.”
Fast forward another two years (give or take) and Reynolds and Jackman are finally getting ready to unleash their joint creation on the world. As with all MCU projects, details are a closely guarded secret, but what’s known is that this time Jackman will be playing an alternative universe version of Wolverine so as not to dishonour Logan’s legacy. Sitting side-by-side in a flash Korean hotel and scoffing Tim Tams, it’s clear that they both relish each other’s company, with their famous faux online rivalry and banter playing out in real time – Jackman reveals he’s given his mate the Aussie nickname “Noldsy” – and both saying it’s the most fun they have ever had on a movie set.
“It’s rare that the experience being that wonderful to make the movie turned into a movie that is somehow better than the experience,” Reynolds says. “Usually, it’s the other way around – you know, fire, pestilence and plague on the set … golden movie. This one, no – the experience was so joyful.”
The only dark cloud for Reynolds is that after multiple promotional stops around the world and the official world premiere in New York next week, it’s all going to end, even if he and Jackman already have plans to work together again.
“It was so profoundly sad to not be working on this movie,” Reynolds says of the feeling of depression that sunk in when and Levy he put the finishing touches on the movie last month. “Because working with Hugh in this way is something that I have wanted for almost my entire career … well at least the part of my career that people gave a shit about … and for it to happen and to happen now in this way – it really did happen at the perfect time and in the perfect way at the right time in our lives.”
Meeting Jackman while shooting X-Men Origins in Sydney had a profound effect of Reynolds, who at 47, is eight years younger than the man he calls his “life Sherpa”. The Canadian says he loves Jackman and Levy “the way I would love my own brothers” – the three live within blocks of each other in New York and all are in and out of each other’s lives through thick and thin. With so much fun had at Jackman’s expense in the first two movies, it’s hard to know how much of it is Deadpool talking and how much his Reynolds himself.
“That’s actually a great question because a lot of the time it is Ryan talking,” he admits. “In the third act of this movie you will see scenes where we are having a conversation and it is very hard to distinguish if it is Deadpool and Wolverine talking or if it’s Ryan and Hugh.
“And it’s more emotional than not, because we have this persona where we joke around and goof off all the time and rival each other but when we’re hanging out, we are usually talking about kind of sensitive stuff and I love it. And there is a moment where you see some of that and that is some of the stuff that I am most proud of.”
Jackman also bobbed up in the most recent season of Welcome To Wrexham, Reynolds’ other passion project in which he and US actor Rob McElhenney turned around the fortunes of a struggling Welsh football club. The Aussie actor says that while he’s given his Canuck counterpart a few lessons on cricket, rugby league and his beloved Manly Sea Eagles so far remain a mystery to him.
“That’s a good idea,” he says to Reynolds, of a possible league-based spin-off. “Has Russell (Crowe) talked to you?”
“I actually have touched base with him because his grandfather is from Wrexham,” says Reynolds of the Oscar-winning Rabbitohs owner. “He reached out and I am a huge, huge fan – he’s easily my favourite Aussie – and it was lovely.
“But Wrexham has touched a lot of people because the show is a mirror, right? People from different towns all over the world when they watch it go ‘that’s my town’.”
But if Reynolds says learned how to behave as a leader on a movie set from observing Jackman, the respect and admiration is clearly mutual.
“I’m going to connect something,” says Jackman. “I am going to get a little sappy. One thing I have learned from Ryan – and it was probably why I was having one of those ‘what do I want to do moments’ – Ry, or Noldsy, that’s his Aussie nickname, actually does the thing that he loves to do. And he said he was having more fun with Wrexham than even your family.
“Oh yeah – by a distance,” says Reynolds of wife Blake Lively and their four children. “I mean off the top of my head I could name two of them … but Wrexham and Deadpool and Wolverine at this time in my life have really been two of the most beautiful gifts I have ever had. I am really not taking it for granted.”
Deadpool and Wolverine is in cinemas on July 25.
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