As part of Variety’s “Actors on Actors” interview series, someone really knew what they were doing by setting up Ryan Reynolds and Andrew Garfield together for a Spideypool meet-cute. The duo talked about donning superhero suits and what it would take to return as Deadpool and Spider-Man for future Marvel Studios projects and the answers may surprise you.
When Garfield asked Reynolds about the Deadpool suit and how much the evolution of it influenced his performance, Reynolds discussed how its challenges informed his character work. “The suits are tough,” Reynolds admitted. “But to me, the suits are freeing in that I find it’s clown work that I’m doing. I have to rely on my voice or micro facial expressions. I rely on my body for more macro expressions.” He said he took inspiration from the likes of Jack Benny, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, and Marcel Marceau.
And the suit is more than just a costume for Deadpool. “Pushing through the suit is challenging. I look at suits a little bit differently, I think, there’s always gotta be a why. Deadpool wears the suit because he’s in a slightly militarized shame spiral and his coping mechanism is humor … the suits are very important. For me, it really is old-fashioned clown work.”
The conversation quickly turned to their most recent appearances as the characters, for Reynolds in Deadpool & Wolverine and for Garfield as the variant Peter Parker/Spider-Man in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Regarding a potential Deadpool return, Reynolds said “My feeling is that that character works very well in two ways. One is scarcity and surprise. Its been six years since the last one and part of the reason is that it it swallows my whole life,” he joked. “I do not know what the future of Deadpool will be. Shawn [Levy] and I made the movie to have a beginning, a middle, and end and be a complete experience instead of a commercial for another one. And I love that. I think it’s sort of important sometimes to make space for a movie to just be a movie.”
“The other thing is I see Deadpool as a supporting character much more than he is a main [character]. We center him sometimes because that’s what they want. You can’t center unless you take everything away from him. You have to create a situation where he’s so much the underdog. And I don’t think I can do that again. So I think if he comes back, it’s going to be in someone else’s movie. Channing Tatum’s so excited to play Gambit, and I would happily be the fifth banana in his movie or anyone else’s.”
The interview is pretty much a hardcore chemistry test—we can’t help but want them to have a rom-com storyline, at least to see Spideypool play out flirtatiously on screen—and they pass with flying colors.
Reynolds showered Garfield with flowers for his dramatic works as well as his appearance in No Way Home: “You guys in that movie did it in such a way that people burst into tears. Everybody burst into tears because you have all that cultural currency and cachet.”
Reynolds compared the scenes featuring multiple Spider-Men to when people saw Wesley Snipes’ Blade in Deadpool & Wolverine. “What’s happening is that they they realize in an instant without maybe intellectualizing it exactly, but they desperately missed this person, but they didn’t know they missed him. When you get something like that, those moments when you’re you’re back in the Spidey suit and you get this chance to do something that you didn’t do before it’s the best feeling on earth … Did you miss playing Spider-Man? Like when you came back to that, how did that feel?”
“Lovely. Just lovely,” Garfield answered. “It’s not that I missed it. It felt undone for me. It was just very gratifying. It was like you’re invited to a party and then the party ends slightly prematurely than you wanted it to end. And then you’re like, I got to reckon with kind of being disinvited to this party. And that’s when like the the work happens, right? That’s when you start to really deal with your own stuff.”
“It was like a few years of that and I’m so grateful for it in retrospect. And even during I was like, yeah, this is this is soul work … one of the first photos of me is in Spider-Man costume that my mother made out of felt. So it’s fucking primal. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this person, this character means so fucking much.'”
For Garfield it was particularly powerful to interact with other Spidey kin. “Coming back … was like being re-welcomed into the party and it could be a party finally.”
Garfield also picked up Reynolds’ point about Deadpool being more of a supporting character if future outings come to pass. “There was something so soothing about it being a playpen actually, for me and [Tobey Maguire], for Tom [Holland]. The pressure was on Tom. It was a beautiful thing to genuinely feel like you were in support of a Spider brother and I do mean that sincerely. We have an opportunity that no one’s ever had, where it’s like a Spider-Man support group. What does that look like? What’s the dynamic that we could build that is completely specific and unique to these particular Spider people?”
Watch the full interview below, and cross your fingers that one day this duo will team up on a Spideypool project.
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