Ryan Reynolds knows a thing or two about marketing a decent gin, running the oldest football club in Wales, and making Deadpool films. It turns out, though, that he knows nothing about casting.
We hate to bad mouth the man who gave us Green Lantern, but while on the road promoting Deadpool and Wolverine, he uttered the dumbest thing he’s said since saying ‘yes’ to R.I.P.D.
“There’s only been one Wolverine,” Reynolds told a crowd of fans in Berlin. “The reason is no one can do it except Hugh Jackman…”
Now, we know that he was just being nice about his co-star, and Jackman is a legend who deserves to be recognized for helping kickstart the X-Men films and the superhero movie boom.
The best at what he does…
“There’s only been one Wolverine, the reason is no one can do it except Hugh Jackman”– Ryan Reynolds#DeadpoolAndWolverine pic.twitter.com/vszDKU75YR
— Marvel News Feed (@MarvelNewsFeed) July 8, 2024
We also know that Reynolds is ultimately trying to sell tickets to his new movie, but does he seriously believe that no one else could squeeze into Logan’s tight yellow spandex?
No, Reynolds is perpetrating one of the most irritating myths in modern Hollywood: that some performances are so iconic that it’d be cultural vandalism for any other actor to try to put their own spin on them.
This thinking is reductive and boring because, for years, Hollywood was more than comfortable with recasting iconic characters, and you know what? It worked.
Look at Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning version of the Joker. His anarchic and wild performance couldn’t be further away from Jack Nicholson’s more erudite and polished take on the Harlequin of Hate, yet both spins on the supervillain are rightly lauded as iconic in their own way.
It would have been a great shame if director Christopher Nolan had forced Ledger to play the character like Nicholson did or, worse, brought back Nicholson because ‘that’s the version fans like.’
No, he took a chance, and it paid off, but Hollywood execs these days are often too risk-averse to try anything new for fear of alienating the hardcore fans. It’s hardly the only time we’ve seen this from Marvel, either.
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When Kevin Feige was promoting the Spider-Man movie No Way Home, he suggested that you “can’t get better than Alfred Molina as Doc Ock.”
Now, I love Molina’s version of Ock, but I genuinely don’t understand this mentality. We don’t pretend that only one person could ever play Hamlet or Othello, so why have we started pretending that Spider-Man villains are sacrosanct?
… and what he does isn’t pretty
Imagine if Hollywood had taken this attitude to recasting when Sean Connery had wanted to hand back his license to kill.
We’d have missed out on Roger Moore’s one-liners, Daniel Craig’s ruggedness, and Pierce Brosnan’s suaveness – and I don’t want to live in a world without Brosnan’s suaveness.
Instead, we’d have been watching an octogenarian Bond grapple with his greatest villain yet, the childproof lock on his blood pressure medication.
There are hundreds of actors out there who could play Wolverine (Legendary X-Men writer Chris Claremont famously wanted Bob Hoskins to play Logan back in the day, and that’s something we could have gotten behind), and if the MCU wants to endure, then Feige and the suits at Marvel Studios are going to have to find one of them and find them soon.
It’s OK to bring Jackman back for a film like Deadpool 3 (and probably Secret Wars), which essentially serves as a victory lap for Jackman and Reynolds. Yet if Marvel wants to make the X-Men relevant and have longevity in the MCU, they need to step out of the shadow of Fox’s merry mutants at some point, which will mean recasting.
That might be tough for fans to accept, but like the mutants at the center of the X-Men, franchises have to keep evolving; otherwise, they die.
If you’re still invested in the future of the MCU, then check out our guide to all the upcoming Marvel movies. We’ve also got a complete ranking of every MCU movie, as well!