Ryan Reynolds shares why he chose not to ‘get paid’ for Deadpool

‘One of the great enemies of creativity is too much time and money,’ the actor said

Ryan Reynolds has revealed he sacrificed his Deadpool salary in order to get the first film in the superhero franchise made.

The Green Lantern actor, 47, first played Deadpool in the Hugh Jackman-led X-Men spin-off, 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which was poorly received. Despite the movie’s unpopularity, Reynolds fought to make a standalone film and Deadpool was released in 2016.

Reynolds, who spent over a decade trying to get Deadpool made, has admitted that in order to get the film through production with 20th Century Fox, he personally paid for his writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick to be on set, leaving him without a salary.

Speaking to The New York Times, Reynolds revealed: “No part of me was thinking when Deadpool was finally greenlit that this would be a success.”

“I even let go of getting paid to do the movie just to put it back on the screen,” he added. “They wouldn’t allow my co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick on set, so I took the little salary I had left and paid them to be on set with me so we could form a de facto writers room.”

Reynolds admitted the process of making Deadpool had been “a lesson in a couple of senses” about working with minimal resources.

“I think one of the great enemies of creativity is too much time and money,” he said. “And that movie had neither time nor money. It really fostered focusing on character over spectacle, which is a little harder to execute in a comic-book movie.”

Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ (20th Century Studios /MARVEL)

“I was just so invested in every micro-detail of it and I hadn’t felt like that in a long, long time,” the star continued. “I remembered wanting to feel that more — not just on Deadpool, but on anything.”

It comes after Reynolds previously expressed regret for the watered down version of his Deadpool character that was depicted in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

In the film, Deadpool is shown to have surgically sealed up his mouth, stripping the character, who is known for his fourth wall-breaking, foul-mouthed wisecracks, of the very reason he is such a success.

​​This flourish was considered sacrilege by many, especially when considering Deadpool’s popular moniker is “the merc with a mouth”.

“It’s easy to say we got some things wrong,” Reynolds reflected. “Deadpool sewing up his mouth was one of the all-time foolish studio notes.”