Ryan Reynolds Pleaded With Fox To Greenlight Deadpool Before Taking On Green Lantern

When Ryan Reynolds joined the ever-growing universe of cinematic superheroes, his debut was met with outrage to no fault of his own. The actor signed on to play Wade Wilson, AKA: Deadpool, in X-Men Origins: Wolverine - but the character was barely recognizable to fans. Reynolds then moved onto another superhero franchise when he signed on to play Hal Jordan, the titular hero of Green Lantern. The film flopped with fans and critics, but Reynolds has since redeemed himself with his latest go at Deadpool this year.

But, according to the actor, his troubled tenure as Green Lantern could have been easily avoided. In a recent interview, Reynolds told GQ that he begged Fox to greenlight a solo Deadpool movie before he accepted his casting offer on Green Lantern.

"I wrote a letter to my executive at Fox saying, 'I'm gonna take this movie Green Lantern if you guys aren't gonna make Deadpool. I'm at the altar, about to say 'I do' to somebody else, but tell me you want to spend the rest of your life with me, because I want to spend the rest of my life with you,'" he recalled. "They said, 'Unfortunately, we can't green-light that movie, and I don't think it's ever going to get green-lit.' So I was like, Okay, I'm gonna go move on with my life, then, I guess."

And so he did. Reynolds agreed to star in the live-action adaptation of Green Lantern, a move he now openly regrets. In fact, the actor has become known for poking fun at the failed film in interviews and even on-screen roles. While the actor stresses the role was an opportunity he couldn't pass up, he wishes the project as a whole had been better planned.

"You just go back to script, script, script," Reynolds said at a recent Q&A screening of Deadpool. "[On Green Lantern] we did not have a working script until we were halfway through shooting. That is a handicap, there's nothing you can do about that. And that's just the nature of this business oftentimes, it's a poster and release date first, start shooting and we'll figure out the rest as we go. And it's just, it's insane. It's hard for everyone. Everyone that worked on that movie gave their last drop of blood."

Luckily, Reynolds had a chance to redeem his superhero status when Deadpool eventually got the go-ahead over at Fox. The film finally received clearance after test footage of it was leaked and fans went wild for it. To this day, no word has ever been given on who exactly dumped the online to video - but Reynolds has his suspicions.

During an interview with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, the actor admitted there were only four people who could've leaked the footage, and one of them is himself. "I know that one of us did it," Reynolds said. "There's four of us. There's me, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Tim Miller, the director. One of us did it. We all sort of said at the beginning, 'Someone should leak it. Someone should leak it'...but I'm 70 percent sure it wasn't me."

[H/T] GQ