Deadpool 2 writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick recently spoke with superherohype.com. Here are some of the highlights from that conversation:
When Cable and Liefeld’s other New Mutants and X-Force were debuting in the 90’s there was this instant popularity, as well as an instant backlash to the way those characters were depicted with these huge guns, huge thighs, a million pouches, all the women looked like porn stars, etc. Are you going to have fun with the absurdity of that at all?
Paul Wernick: “Well you’ll have to see! (laughs) I don’t wanna jinx stuff, but yeah, probably. We’ll have to talk about that.”
Liefeld very much set the tone for those characters for the rest of their run, the way they’re depicted. The ultra-masculinity of it all. That feels like perfect ground for Deadpool to walk all over.
Rhett Reese: “Yeah! Ryan plays Deadpool with a hint of femininity, and I think that can be funny opposite a Cable who’s über-masculine. That’ll come into casting and performance and the character design and his wardrobe and things like that too. I think we’ll definitely play into that.”
At the core of the first “Deadpool” there was, at its core, a very emotional, classical “Phantom of the Opera”-esque love story with tragedy and pathos and all that good stuff. How important was it to keep the emotional grounding for the sequel?
Wernick: “VERY. Very. It’s what we spent much of our last several years doing is teasing out the emotion of the story. The humor and all that is obviously going to be there, so now we’re focusing on the emotion and such. Again, as you mentioned, Deadpool at the core was a love story and an emotional story, and we wanted to bring the audience to that same place in a different way on the sequel.”
That special teaser for Deadpool just came out. Is that a good indicator of what we’re in for in the sequel or was it meant as sort of an absurd one-off?
Reese: “It was a little more absurd, to be honest. If you look at the plot, abandoning an innocent man as he tries to get dressed, that’s probably something that doesn’t fit into a movie. It wouldn’t work in the logic of a movie, but Deadpool affords us the opportunity to break rules, always. We just thought, “Let’s make a silly short that doesn’t really happen to Deadpool.” We don’t really like to adhere to any rules in Deadpool. Even the tone can be more absurd if we feel like it’s funny. That was our goal there.”