Ryan Reynolds
"Deadpool" actor Ryan Reynolds, pictured here at SiriusXM's Entertainment Weekly Radio Special on Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2016, in New York, said he tried to warn producers that they were screwing up the character in "X-Men Origins: Wolverine." Getty Images

Any “Deadpool” fan knows that the character’s first outing on the big screen in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” wasn’t exactly what comic book fans were hoping for. Now, with the 2016 standalone movie poised to rectify all mistakes, actor Ryan Reynolds is getting candid about his previous foray into the part of Wade Wilson.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly’s radio show on SiriusXM, the actor shared some pretty shocking details about “Origins” and what exactly went wrong. For starters, the film took the infamous "merc with a mouth" and promptly sewed that mouth shut. His trademark red suit never made it on screen, and the character’s only saving grace was the brief time that Reynolds could ad-lib lines at the beginning of the movie. Because the movie was written during the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike, the actor says he wrote or improvised almost everything Wade said before getting sewed up.

“If you watch the movie, you’ll see it’s partly me playing it and then I said, ‘I can’t do this,’” Reynolds confessed. “Then they have another actor playing it. So you see in the movie that it’s me with my shirt off and my mouth sewn shut and I look a little bit more like Dick Van Dyke next to the new guy, who is like 20 pounds more muscle than me and just this huge martial arts guy.”

As Reynolds tells the story, he was attached to a standalone Deadpool movie at the time that got scrapped. When “Origins” became the only Wade Wilson role out there, he reluctantly signed on to the cameo part while filming the movie "The Proposal." At the time, he says he warned producers that comic book fans were going to hate the changes they were making to the character — which they did.

“The movie was very successful,” he said. “But the Deadpool part they didn’t like at all. Oh god, I remember getting a call from that same executive who said ‘can you fly back and reshoot some stuff?’ and I’m like ‘I’m shooting another movie, I can’t!’”

It all worked out in the end as Reynolds got to finally make the “Deadpool” film fans always wanted. As CinemaBlend notes, 20th Century Fox appears to be in on the joke, apparently letting the writers not only separate Deadpool from the version previously established in its "X-Men" universe, but comment on his “Origins” role as well. Although the film won’t be released until Friday, a promotional video in which Deadpool celebrates Australia Day already saw the "merc with a mouth" address his role in “Origins,” calling it “a career low” for him.

To see the actor’s best attempt at pleasing the comic book fans, one only needs to go out and see “Deadpool” when it hits theaters this Friday.

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