Ryan Reynolds was willing to self-fund this passion project.
Indeed, the Deadpool actor recently opened up about how he managed to get the movie off the ground prior to its original release in 2016, noting it had been ten years in the making.
“No part of me was thinking when Deadpool was finally greenlit that this would be a success,” Ryan shared to the New York Times in an interview published July 15. “I even let go of getting paid to do the movie just to put it back on the screen. 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.”
And while the 47-year-old—who shares kids James, 9, Inez, 7, Betty, 4, and a fourth baby born in February 2023 with Blake Lively—had to scrounge to make his vision successful, he managed to learn a lot from the experience.