‘Deadpool 2’: Ryan Reynolds Reveals How Hard it Was to Get ‘X-Men: Origins Wolverine’ Footage

Deadpool 2 is the king of the box office (for the moment), and star Ryan Reynolds is now able to talk a lot more about how the movie came together, and all the other usual fan-fav anecdotes about what happened behind the scenes. today we learn some new details about just how hard it was to pull off that big Deadpool 2 mid-credits scene sequence, thanks to Ryan Reynolds himself!

Reynolds recently did the Empire Film Podcast, where he revealed (among other things) that it required an actual legitimate quest in order to obtain the necessary footage from X-Men Origins: Wolverine to use in Deadpool’s hilarious retcon of the X-Men movies timeline. As Reynolds tells it:

“We had a dick of a time trying to get the actual raw footage from ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine.’ The movie was shot on film, it wasn’t shot on digital, so it was harder to get. And even though we were sitting there on the Fox lot, the exact piece of the movie we need had been damaged, on whatever the transfer was. So we had to go to some backup which was in some, vault somewhere in the middle of the country of the united states, and we ended up finally at the last second inputting it into the movie.”

For as much fun as it was for fans to see, Reynolds reveals that for him, pulling off that mid-credits scene was actually a pretty nerve-wracking endeavor, that also threatened to become a major embarrassment:

“For me I was literally losing sleep over it, though. I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, how are we going to do this? Am I going to have to call Hugh and ask him to shoot this chunk that looks exactly like a movie he’s already done? I can’t think of a worse hell for a human being to do then go, ‘Hey why don’t you take the scene from a movie you did ten years ago and recreate it exactly?’ So no, we ended up getting the little piece of footage.”

To be fair, Hugh Jackman has been a pretty good sport about the Deadpool franchise’s obsession with him and the Wolverine franchise, but even he might’ve had a hard time revisiting the trauma that was X-Men Origins: Wolverine – especially when he learned that he would be doing all the work to recreate the scene. According to Reynolds, his side of the scene was already intact and ready:

“Ironically my side was fine. His side, the one shot we needed of him going “Wade?” as he’s looking at the bizarro Baraka-pool thing, we just didn’t have. Yeah.”

Admittedly, it would’ve been kind of funny to see an older Jackman in a bad wig, recreating the scene from Wolverine nearly ten years ago. However, seeing Deadpool step into the actual movie was a novelty that most fans won’t soon forget.

Deadpool 2 is now in theaters. The X-Men movie universe will continue when X-Men: Dark Phoenix opens February 14, 2019, followed by The New Mutants on August 2, 2019.