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Ryan Reynolds in Free Guy: Hollywood star tells STM why he was deeply invested in new movie

When Disney acquired 21st Century Fox in 2019 for the eye-watering sum of $97 billion, the Mouse House inherited a ton of intellectual property and a slate of films in various stages of development. While it’s unlikely anyone in the Magical Kingdom celebrated the addition of Freddie Got Fingered to the Disney IP catalogue, other properties were much more eagerly received, by studio executives and fans alike. High on the latter list was Deadpool, the famously foul-mouthed and gory superhero franchise starring Ryan Reynolds in the titular role, which, for the execs, had a lot to do with its $2.1 billion record at the box office. The fans, meanwhile, were delirious at the possibilities that might arise from a third Deadpool instalment, which would finally see the Merc with a Mouth take his rightful place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Lost in the hype around the very idea of a Deadpool 3 (Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has since confirmed production will begin next year at the earliest) was another blockbuster starring Reynolds — Free Guy. In an industry where franchises are king and big-budget original movies are rarer than people willing to get the AstraZeneca jab, it speaks volumes for the bankability of Reynolds that Free Guy was one of the first Fox-developed films to be greenlit after the merger. It probably didn’t hurt that Reynolds himself was locked in as a producer, an obvious sign of how invested an actor is in a project, with the affable Canadian admitting in 2019 he hadn’t “been this fully immersed and engaged in something since Deadpool”. The movie sees Reynolds play Guy, a friendly and inoffensive regular Joe type, who is stuck, quite happily, in the daily grind of a dead-end bank teller job. Take fame, wealth and a fairytale marriage to actor Blake Lively out of the equation and it might surprise you to learn that 44-year-old Reynolds’ own life is not dissimilar. “I have three kids six and under, so it kinda is like that,” he says on a Zoom call with STM. “I mean it’s, you know, wake up, get them ready for school, feed them, walk them to school, come home, try to go to the gym ... Rinse and repeat.” However, we soon learn Guy is not the hero of his own story but merely a character in a computer game being played by humans in the real world. To make matters worse, Guy is a so-called non-player character — or NPC to the gamers — which is a term for characters controlled by the computer (instead of the player) that usually have a predetermined set of behaviours designed to simulate a personality. Those predetermined behaviours (read: Guy’s blissfully repetitive existence) are upended when he encounters Molotov Girl, a player in the game being controlled in the real world by Mille (Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer). When Reynolds first read the script he thought it was perfect — just not necessarily for him. “I read this script and it sort of stuck with me a little bit, but it was one of those weird situations where I sent the script to (director buddy) Shawn Levy, within an accompanying email, sort of designed to convince him to want to do it,” Reynolds admits. “And what I didn’t expect would happen was that email that I sent to Shawn would also convince me I wanted to do it.” Levy, by the way, brings a very solid body of work to the table, including the hit comedy Date Night, starring Steve Carell and Tina Fey, the billion-dollar Night at the Museum franchise and several episodes of Stranger Things, on which he also served as executive producer. Born of a mutual desire to work on something together, the men saw instant potential in the script and embarked on an extensive re-write process with its author, Matt Lieberman (The Christmas Chronicles), and Zak Penn, co-writer of The Avengers. Reynolds saw the unbridled fun of Free Guy as an antidote to what he was seeing in the world back then, which, in case you’ve forgotten, was the peak of the Trump era in America. And it may just be a coincidence, but the film’s origins overlap with the rise of an internet meme around video game NPCs, something the alt-right adopted as shorthand for accusing liberals of not being able to think for themselves. The rise and use of the meme, which consisted of a rudimentary line drawing of a man’s face, was covered by The New York Times in 2018, and it certainly wouldn’t be the first time an article in that newspaper had inspired a motion picture. In that context, Free Guy, a movie about an NPC who breaks out of his rut and becomes a genuine hero (both within the game and to humans in the real world), could almost be seen as a political statement. Of course, the political climate is considerably different now, and many of those alt-right trolls have disappeared back into their dark corners of the internet, but the significance of Free Guy’s arrival now, in the middle of a pandemic, is not lost on Reynolds. “I really felt like it could be this fastball of joy in a time of just utter, you know, thickets of shit,” he says, with the droll tone he has become synonymous with. “Like this has just been such a difficult, challenging time for so many people, and I just love this idea of wish fulfilment (in the movie).” For the film’s director and its star, their collective wish was to create a movie that engendered the same feelings they had while watching classic films from their own childhood, but updated for a generation who’ve been raised by the iPhone and Xbox. “We were aiming for that feeling that I got when I was a kid, and Shawn got when he was a kid, when we walked out of the movie theatre after watching Back to the Future for the first time,” Reynolds says. “And I remember grinning from ear to ear and ... feeling so happy at the end, so that was something I wanted so badly (to give audiences), especially when we were shooting this movie in the sort of thrust and crux of like, real global negativity; like I mean this has been a really f...ing hard five years for a lot of people in a lot of different and nuanced ways.” For Comer, Free Guy represents a long-awaited big screen debut, after earning acclaim playing the psychopathic Russian assassin Villanelle on the hit BBC spy thriller Killing Eve, a role she’s inhabited since 2018. The computer game the film is based around is of the Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto variety, so the action comes thick and fast, something both Reynolds and Comer are well suited to. Reynolds, in recent years, has become one of Hollywood’s pre-eminent purveyors of the action-comedy blockbuster, with the aforementioned Deadpool, the Hitman’s Bodyguard movies and a slate of Netflix films, including Red Notice, which arrives in November and also stars Dwayne Johnson and Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman). When it comes to the comedy in Free Guy, the Deadpool star does all the heavy lifting, but he gets a little help from his mates in the form of a series of big-name cameos. “There’s so much that’s been written about the film industry and show business and Hollywood, and you read so many things that are just so utterly terrible about that industry and the people in it ... Largely true,” Reynolds says. But, when he picked up the phone to Chris “Captain America” Evans, who lived not far from where the production was happening in Boston, there was no hesitation. “I mean, he didn’t ask what it was; I could have said, like ‘it’s the most graphic nude scene you’ll ever do in your life’, but he didn’t even ask, he just showed up,” Reynolds recalls. The film also features cameos from Johnson, Channing Tatum and, it almost goes without saying, Australia’s Hugh Jackman. For those who came in late, Reynolds and Jackman have had one of the funniest and long-running celebrity “feuds”, with both actors regularly poking fun at the other on social media, often using it as a way to promote their respective business interests or charities. So, needless to say, Reynolds couldn’t resist having a crack at his old sparring partner when he learnt this writer was from Perth, the home of WAAPA, where Jackman learnt to act. “Perth. Really? I thought it was Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada,” Reynolds quips. But of all the cameos in the movie, Reynolds is particularly fond of a musical cameo by his co-star. “One of my favourites is Jodie Comer, who is singing (Mariah Carey’s) Fantasy in the third act of the movie ... in this kind of downtempo way,” he enthuses. “That was Jodie, who, at the last second, I remember texting, and I was like ‘would you ever be open to singing a song in the movie’, and she was just like ‘yep’, then she went and did it.” Luckily for everyone concerned, Comer, like the film itself, hits all the right notes. Free Guy is in cinemas from Thursday Aug 12Photography by Guy Aroch

The West Australian exclusiveRyan Reynolds in Free Guy: Hollywood star tells STM why he was deeply invested in new movie

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Ryan Reynolds in Free Guy: Hollywood star tells STM why he was deeply invested in new movie