Andrew Garfield and Ryan Reynolds on WE LIVE IN TIME and DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE for VARIETY Magazine

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In a new conversation for VARIETY’s ‘Actors on Actors’ issue, Andrew Garfield and Ryan Reynolds discuss the making of “Deadpool & Wolverine,” the future of the Deadpool franchise, Garfield’s lifelong connection with Spider-Man, “We Live in Time,” and more.

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Reynolds on working with Hugh Jackman, Disney, and Marvel for “Deadpool & Wolverine”: “Disney and Marvel, they were so supportive from the jump. I think I had one line that Bob Iger wanted out of the movie, and we took it out…I’ll never repeat it. I promised I wouldn’t…They were incredible partners. It was meant to be, because the first pitch I had for Marvel and Kevin Feige five years ago was a Deadpool-Wolverine movie in the ‘Rashomon’ style, which is his perspective, then mine, then an objective…And they said no. So then I pitched the most idiotic movies. One was a Sundance movie I pitched them—no special effects, no conflict. And then I pitched one where it’s a two-hander with me and the hunter who shot Bambi’s mom. Their answer was ‘We don’t touch Bambi, Ryan.’…So it was like a year and a half of tap dancing until Hugh called and said, ‘I want to come back and do this.’”

Reynolds on the future of the Deadpool franchise: “Honestly, my feeling is that the character works very well in two ways. One is scarcity and surprise. So it had been six years since the last one, and part of the reason is that it swallows my whole life. I have four kids, and I don’t ever want to be an absentee [dad]. I kind of die inside when I see their faces and they do a sports thing or something and I missed it. I don’t know what the future of ‘Deadpool’ will be, but I do know that we made the movie to be a complete experience instead of a commercial for another one.”

Reynolds on the self-awareness and meta nature of “Deadpool & Wolverine,” and how he convinced Disney it would work: “I look at authorship and control, or however you want to frame it, as trust. Part of my job…well, I have several parts of the job. One, I have to convince the studio, who’s making a significant investment in mine and Shawn Levy’s ability to land the plane on a dime. And our job is to return that investment. And that really is a big construct of this business…I’ve spent a long time doing work and roles that were incredibly fulfilling and nuanced and different and unexpected and charactery and movies that were received really well by critics, but not audiences. I thought, ‘Well, if I want to continue to do this, I have to figure out how to work both sides of the room and make sure that part of my job is choosing work that will beget more of this experience that I love.’”

Garfield on his lifelong connection with Spider-Man: “I’m so grateful for it, in retrospect. And even during, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is soul work.’ One of the first photos of me as a 3-year-old is in a Spider-Man costume that my mother made out of felt. And I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this person, this character, it means so fucking much to me.’”

Garfield on what drew him to “We Live in Time,” which explores the relationship between two romantic partners over years of ups and downs: “I’ve been initiated recently into a new visceral understanding of how fucking short this visit is on this planet, in this body. And I feel this crazy new urgency. I had a different kind of urgency in my 20s and my 30s, I think, which was, as you kind of referenced earlier, kind of patching over—trying to deal with the wounded-ness. Now, it’s an urgency of living life as fully and vitally…I only want to do the things that speak to my soul. Culturally, right now, there’s so much numbness and lack of awareness of how life matters and that we all have a soul.”

Reynolds on his relationship with his father: “My relationship with my father was very complicated. I come from a middle-class, blue-collar home, and my dad was of that generation where he was Clint Eastwood. Simple grunts is how he communicated…People tell themselves stories, and we have some responsibility as we grow older to question that a little bit. I’ve done that a bit more in the last five years; I didn’t know myself until I was probably 40-ish. I ask that question often: ‘Was my dad as challenging as I like to think? Or am I romanticizing that to pave over all these other things with whatever the drug is.’ The story is not true; nobody’s black and white like that.”

[Photo Credit: Alexi Lubomirski for Variety Magazine]

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