Ryan Reynolds Paid ‘Deadpool’ Screenwriters ‘Out of His Own Pocket’

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Ryan Reynolds reflected on the rocky road to getting the first Deadpool movie made. By the time the film came out in 2016, he says, he’d already been working on it for a decade with screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick.

“No part of me was thinking when ‘Deadpool’ was finally greenlit that this would be a success,” he admitted. “I even let go of getting paid to do the movie just to put it back on the screen. They wouldn’t allow my co-writers on set, so I took the little salary I had left and paid them to be on set with me so we could form a de facto writers room.”

Reynolds is one of those cheesy celebrities that I want to hate, but time and again he proves himself to be, you know, a decent human being. Add this to the list.

He called the experience “a lesson in a couple of senses.”

“I think one of the great enemies of creativity is too much time and money, and that movie had neither time nor money. It really fostered focusing on character over spectacle, which is a little harder to execute in a comic-book movie. I was just so invested in every micro-detail of it and I hadn’t felt like that in a long time.”

Reese and Wernick confirmed Reynolds’s claims that he paid them himself in those early days, saying, “It really was a core creative team of us, Ryan, and the director Tim Miller. Fox, interestingly, wouldn’t pay for us to be on set. Ryan Reynolds paid out of his own money, out of his own pocket.”

“Necessity is the mother of invention. The more constraints you place on a creative process, the more you think outside of the box. So, personally, I didn’t want more money than we needed. We wanted just enough money to make what we set out to make, but also find ways to creatively pivot,” Reynolds added.

Maybe this is why Reynolds has his hands in almost everything—liquor and sports and the occasional targeted-advertising viral moment—so he doesn’t have to rely on filmmaking for money. If that’s your process, go for it, I guess.