Ryan Reynolds knew getting Chris Evans to appear in Deadpool & Wolverine wouldn’t be easy. Even though the Marvel mainstay wouldn’t be coming back as his signature role as Captain America, Reynolds figured it couldn’t hurt to make the role a bit more important than a mere cameo. And, once he did that, Evans agreed… with one small caveat.
On the director’s commentary for Deadpool & Wolverine, which is available digitally now, Reynolds and co-writer/director Shawn Levy talked about the film’s surprising end-credits scene. The scene reveals that Evans’ character, Johnny Storm, said everything Deadpool claims he did about Cassandra Nova. And it was that expletive-filled speech, and specifically its placement, that got Evans to come back.
“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 having Marvel instincts. He knew appearing in an end-credits scene would get fans excited, but he also knew him sitting there spouting off curses would be the perfect Deadpool subversion 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.”
And we love it too. Check back next week for more from the Deadpool & Wolverine digital release, which is out now. It’ll be available on 4K, Blu-ray and DVD October 22.
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