Ryan Reynolds has fundamentally changed the corpse fight between Deadpool and Wolverine

If a representative for New Zealand-based company Wētā FX asked if Polygon could tell anyone about the company’s work on Deadpool and Wolverineone entry on the project list made the answer an immediate yes. Wētā, co-founded by Peter Jackson, the director of the Lord of the Rings series, has worked on all three Deadpool films, particularly on designing Deadpool’s masked facial expression. Still, the project I had the most questions about was “a digitally enhanced Wolverine corpse.” It turns out that Deadpool and Wolverine Star/producer/co-writer Ryan Reynolds has strong opinions about how much skin a decaying body needs for comedic purposes – and to poke fun at co-star Hugh Jackman. Wētā was on hand to help.

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for the opening sequence of Deadpool & Wolverine — and the end of 2017’s Logan.]

The latest Deadpool film begins with Deadpool (Reynolds) telling the audience that he is about to desecrate the much-praised tragic ending of the 2017 film. Loganthe film, which supposedly features both Wolverine’s death and Hugh Jackman’s withdrawal from the role of the characterNeeding a replacement Wolverine due to machinations in the multiverse, Deadpool finds Logan’s grave and digs up his body, assuming he has been healed and revived thanks to his famous healing factor.

Instead, he finds a desiccated mummy. It’s a thin layer of rotting, desiccated skin and muscle over Wolverine’s adamantium-infused skeleton – which Deadpool uses as an improvised weapon, using what’s left of Logan’s corpse to slaughter an entire team of Time Variance Authority soldiers.

In the version of the scene shot by director Shawn Levy and played by Reynolds, there was no mummy, says VFX Supervisor Daniel Macarin. “Originally they wanted to make some kind of prosthetic for a dead Wolverine that he rips out of the ground,” says Macarin. “And then when they thought about it, they thought: If he has so much skin or organic material on his body, wouldn’t people say, “Why doesn’t he just heal? Why doesn’t he come back to life? Why doesn’t anything happen?” The question might arise, Will there be an additional scene where he opens his eyes and suddenly this zombie Wolverine is in the world?

“To get away from that, they finally decided Let’s make it a skeleton – just an adamantium skeleton. People will understand. It won’t cause confusion. They know the skeleton won’t start walking around. That’s the better idea. So that’s how they shot the sequence.”

Macarin confirms that Reynolds used a fake skeleton as a weapon in the original footage: “That prop was real. Even if he’s just whipping it back and forth and hitting TVA agents with it, he’s hitting them with the prop.”

But afterwards, Reynolds looked at the scene on screen and thought again about how he could make it funnier.

“Ryan said: Yes, it works – but here’s what I want to do. I want to desecrate Hugh Jackman’s body and I want to take it to the next level. I want Hugh to see it and I want him to start laughing.”, says Macarin.

In Macarin’s retelling, Reynolds decided there was a way to clear up any confusion about Logan’s possible resurrection: “Let’s put some skin on his face […] and when it’s time for Hugh Jackman’s credits, we’ll peel off the skin and reveal [the skull]. What do you think? And we thought: Tear skin. Yes. OK. Yes, no, that sounds good.

So we took our team and started taking Hugh’s likeness and seeing how much of it we could put into a zombie face. […] We talked about little dangling bits of skin falling off and whether his eye would pop out when he gets bumped by TVA agents. There were a lot of creative conversations about what we were allowed to do with that and what would make it more or less funny for the moment.”

Reynolds was similarly hands-on with other aspects of the production, says Macarin, particularly how Deadpool’s facial expressions came across through his mask. One of Wētā’s effects design tasks Deadpool and Wolverine — and the two previous Deadpool films produced by 20th Century Fox — was to achieve the consistent look of Deadpool’s mask. While scenes for those films were shot with a practical costume version of the mask, Deadpool was digitally enhanced to make his emotions more apparent — to narrow or widen his eyes in ways a real mask can’t, or to allow micro-expressions like a worried frown or a smirk to show through.

Macarin says Reynolds sometimes watched clips from the film and was concerned that his facial expressions didn’t convey enough emotion to get him on the makeup team.

“We’ve had such a great relationship with Ryan for so long,” says Macarin. “He’s very, very comfortable sending us videos on his phone or calling us and saying, ‘Hey, I want to try this in a few different ways.'” The is what I did that day. Let’s see it faster.’ Or, ‘Let’s try this other line. I might want to say this other thing. Tell me what you think that would look like, what that would feel like.'”

Macarin says that Reynolds usually relies only on the Wētā team’s experience with his face to make these changes: “He puts a lot of trust in us. We’ve studied his face for so many years that we have a good idea of ​​what he might say [a newly added line]and how the moment works, in a kind of Ryan Reynolds model.” But Reynolds also occasionally shot new reference material “for very specific moments where he either wants to try out some options or where he really has a certain idea in mind.”

A great example of Deadpool and Wolverine: “Every time he interacted with Dogpool.” Reynolds especially wanted to make sure Deadpool’s emotions were clearly visible on screen when he reunited with Dogpool (played by Peggy, aka “Britain’s ugliest dog”).

“The moment when Dogpool comes through the portal and Deadpool falls to his knees – it was really, really important to Ryan that people understand the love in Deadpool’s face, his absolute joy and his reaction when Dogpool jumps into his arms,” ​​says Macarin.

“And because Deadpool’s mask has such an inverted V [shape]it gives him a neutral, angry look, which is really cool for action scenes, but not so great for moments like this. So he said: I want you to turn the V all the way up, and I want the inner brows to be really high. He’s just in love with this moment and I want to feel it. And he sent us a video of [the facial expression he wanted]. We all laughed, but we understood what he wanted.”

Deadpool and Wolverine is now in theaters.