Comic-book fans wanted a Deadpool spinoff for years, but it seemed like it was a dead proposition. How did the project suddenly get on the fast track to production?
Leaked test footage. Exclusively the leaked test footage, 100 percent.
Who leaked it?
I would have, if I had known it would have caused that! Honestly, we all thought Tim Miller, the director, had leaked it. But I have since investigated that enough, in quiet moments when he was beyond the point of being penalized by anybody, and he said that he really didn’t do it. The initial [leak] came from Fox they think — someone recorded the footage on their iPhone and then released it. And then once that happened, somebody hacked into Blurred Studios and got the original footage in high-res and put it online.
So when you saw it online were you nervous? Excited?
I was excited, because you can look back at an email chain from all of us, the core group involved in Deadpool, saying “We should leak this, f—-,” like three years ago. Saying, “Hey, if this thing is going to stagnate, one of us should just say ‘Whoops, I slipped it online by accident.’” And nobody seemed to want to nut up and do that, myself included. Someone did it for us, years later, when we all completely assumed it was dead in the water.
Now, we get to make the movie. We don’t get to make it with the budget of most superhero movies, but we get to make it the way we want to make it, so that’s even more exciting than having a catered lunch.
This will be your second superhero movie as the leading man. What did you learn from the first, Green Lantern, that you can bring to this one?
Well, script. When we shot Green Lantern, nobody auditioning for the role of Green Lantern was given the opportunity to read the script, because the script didn’t exist. I’m not complaining about it — it was an opportunity of a lifetime, and if I were to go back and retrace my steps, I would probably do everything the exact same way. But script, that’s what’s different on this one.
We’ve had a script for three years. The script got leaked, and people even loved that. That says a lot — if you can create a script around a comic-book character that is directly within the canon of the character and be embraced. That’s a huge step in the right direction. I’ve since learned that a lot of superhero movies don’t really have a fully functioning draft of the screenplay ready until they’re already well into shooting.
