The filmmaker on helming this year’s only Disney Marvel film, fan scrutiny and his co-writing bromance with Ryan Reynolds
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After Shawn Levy agreed to direct the third instalment of Marvel’s $1.5bn Deadpool franchise, Ryan Reynolds pulled him aside to make sure he understood what he was signing up for. “I want to do this movie with you, but I’m going to warn you right now,” Levy recalls the star telling him. “Deadpool is much harder to make than a regular movie because the love for it is so profound. The expectations will be immense.” In hindsight, he may have understated things. The discussion between Levy and Reynolds — who are also close friends — took place in early 2021, before it became apparent that the Marvel blockbuster machine was starting to sputter. Since then, the studio has released a number of flops, prompting anxiety on Wall Street and an intervention from Disney chief executive Bob Iger, who last year issued a company-wide edict: make fewer films and focus on quality.  The upshot is that Deadpool & Wolverine will be the only Marvel film released by Disney this year. Expectations are high, to say the least — so much so that Levy and Reynolds, who were co-writers on the script, released a teaser for the film earlier this year that referenced the pressure on it. “I am the Messiah,” Reynolds says from underneath the red Deadpool mask. “I am Marvel Jesus.”
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It is a perfect example of what sets Deadpool apart from other Marvel ventures. Reynolds’ character is a foul-mouthed anti-hero who has a habit of breaking the fourth wall to make smart-arsed comments. Nothing, including the studio footing the bill for the film, appears to be off limits.  “Want to hear something crazy?” Levy asks when we meet in the Tribeca neighbourhood of Lower Manhattan. “We wrote that line two years ago, before we ever knew it would be in any way referential to the current status of Marvel. It’s crazy that it stumbled into this moment where our movie is, in fact, viewed as messianic.”  Levy, 55, is better known for launching his own film franchises than working as a hired gun for a juggernaut like Marvel. In 2006 he directed and co-produced Night at the Museum, kicking off a series that grossed more than $1.3bn worldwide over three films. His company, 21 Laps, also produced Netflix’s monster hit Stranger Things, for which he directed several episodes.  “This is the first time I’m coming into a franchise that existed before I created it,” Levy says. “But whatever anxieties I had about working for the [Marvel] machine were unfounded. I’ve had as much creative freedom and empowerment on this movie as any movie I’ve ever made.”  Shawn Levy (right) and Ryan Reynolds at the New York premiere of ‘Free Guy’, one of their earlier collaborations, in 2021 © Arturo Holmes/WireImage/Getty Images The film is also something of a new experience for Disney and its Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has grossed more than $30bn under the leadership of Marvel chief Kevin Feige since 2008. Deadpool came to Disney after the company’s 2019 acquisition of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, which did not have the same family-friendly ethos as Disney.  Deadpool & Wolverine will be the first Disney Marvel film to carry an R rating in the US, which excludes anyone under 17. The first two films included very un-Disneyish profanity, a strip-club scene, nudity, a sex toy, graphic violence and lots of raunchy humour. There is little reason to think the latest will be tamer.  “People think of the R rating, the very foul language and audacious violence, but what’s really the most fun about making Deadpool is the self-awareness,” Levy says. “He is literally turning and talking to the audience and commenting on culture, Hollywood and the movie itself. That opens up lanes of comedy that are a blast because you get to talk shit about everything.”
The new film brings together Deadpool, aka Wade Wilson, with Wolverine, another Marvel favourite, played by Hugh Jackman. But despite all the violence and raunch, Levy says the Deadpool movies work in part because of the emotional undercurrent that drives them. In the new movie, it is the relationship between the two main characters.  “Male friendship is one of the central themes of Deadpool & Wolverine — the question of how grown men connect, bond, communicate,” he says. “And if you’re Deadpool and Wolverine, sometimes it’s through stabbings.”   Male friendship was also a theme of the production. Levy says he and his two Deadpool stars share a “brotherhood” that began 15 years ago when he met Jackman, who later introduced him to Reynolds. Deadpool is the third movie Levy and Reynolds have made together. Jackman jokes in an email to the FT that he has “spent years feeling jealous” of their friendship. After living in Los Angeles for 27 years and raising four daughters, Canadian-born Levy and his wife Serena moved to Tribeca in 2021. Reynolds and his wife, actress Blake Lively, live nearby, and the two men became almost inseparable.  Ben Stiller and Robin Williams in 2006’s ‘Night at the Museum’, which Levy directed and co-produced © Alamy “To make a new friend in adulthood, for a guy, it’s a rare thing,” Levy says. “But Ryan and I found a simpatico [relationship] both in the creative process and in life that we felt instantly. My wife and daughters make fun of the fact that ‘Daddy has a friend’, but it’s the truth.”  Their proximity also proved conducive to the creative process as the two neighbours wrote and rewrote the new Deadpool together. “We spent months in a room 100 yards from here trying to make each other laugh,” Levy says. “And when we made each other laugh a lot, those jokes ended up in our screenplay.”   The search for killer wisecracks continued throughout the shoot — and even after it had wrapped. “The protagonist is in a mask, so if a new joke comes to us that we feel might be better than what we had, we’ll record it and put it in the movie,” he says. Levy grew up in Montreal, where he developed an interest in acting as a teenager. “I asked my teacher: where does someone go to study theatre?” he recalls. “She told me about Yale, and I decided at that ridiculously young age that I had to go there. That was the first of a series of dumbass, possibly delusional, but fuelled-by-passion decisions.” After graduating, he moved to LA and began making a living as an actor in commercials, in guest appearances on hit TV shows including 21 Jump Street, Thirtysomething and a recurring role in Beverly Hills 90210. Growing tired of auditioning, he enrolled in film school at the University of Southern California and, after graduating in 1994, began directing children’s TV shows before breaking into comedy movies such as 2003’s Just Married and the Steve Martin vehicle Cheaper by the Dozen.
Steve Martin with Piper Perabo and Bonnie Hunt in ‘Cheaper by the Dozen’, 2003 © Alamy Levy admits to having a preference for light-hearted, family-oriented fare. He traces this to growing up with an alcoholic mother. “I lived through dark shit,” he says. “I know now that’s why I refuse to live in or create work that inhabits darkness. I need the faith and the positing of redemptive, happier endings.” He recalls feeling embarrassed about this when he was younger, especially when he saw his contemporaries taking on edgier material, but now declares himself at peace with it. “I think it’s important to affirm lightness and the possibility of connection,” he says. “That fundamentally hopeful stance definitely has found its way into everything I’ve made.”  After the release of Deadpool & Wolverine, he will immediately turn to directing episodes for the fifth season of Stranger Things. “It’s going to be brutally exhausting,” he says. “I desperately need a break.” That may have to wait. After Stranger Things comes another marquee Disney franchise: Star Wars. Levy is in talks with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and chief creative officer Dave Filoni to direct a new film, which is in the early stages.  “It’s going to take some time because it needs to deserve the Star Wars moniker,” he says. “That’s a specific needle to thread.”  It seems Levy’s experience of fan scrutiny is only just beginning. ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ is in UK and US cinemas from July 26