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Deadpool & Wolverine executive producer Wendy Jacobson said grown men were “sobbing” when they saw Hugh Jackman in Wolverine’s iconic yellow suit for the first time.
In his 17 years playing the X-Men character, Jackman has never worn the yellow suit that is synonymous with the character from the original Marvel comics.
“It was one of the craziest things,” Jacobson told the HeyUGuys YouTube channel recently. “It was the camera test. It was before we started shooting. To see both of those guys, first of all, in costume together was just mind-blowing, but Hugh walking out in the yellow and blue, I mean, there were grown men, like, sobbing on set. So we knew it was a special, very special thing.”
Speaking to Variety ahead of his new collaborative movie with Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool character, Jackman said “everyone was in black leather” when the first X-Men movie was coming together in 1999 so “part of my brain was institutionalized that that’s the way it is.”
“As soon as I put [the yellow suit] on, I couldn’t believe I never had before,” he added.
“I’ve never seen a crew reaction like that,” Ryan Reynolds said in the same interview. “We barely talked about the suit in the early development because it was a no-brainer. You don’t do this character now unless he’s in the suit.”
“Hugh Jackman having never appeared in the character’s most iconic suit is like being Superman in 10 movies and never wearing the Superman costume,” Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige added to Variety. “It’s a testament to Wolverine that it didn’t necessarily matter; the character is more than the costume.”
Reynolds first played Deadpool in the Jackman-led X-Men spin-off, 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which was poorly received. Despite the movie’s unpopularity, Reynolds fought to make a standalone film and Deadpool was released in 2016.
Reynolds, who spent over a decade trying to make Deadpool, recently admitted that to get the film through production with 20th Century Fox, he personally paid for his writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick to be on set, leaving him without a salary.
Speaking to The New York Times, Reynolds revealed: “No part of me was thinking when Deadpool was finally greenlit that this would be a success.”
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“I even let go of getting paid to do the movie just to put it back on the screen,” he added. “They wouldn’t allow my co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick 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.”
Deadpool & Wolverine will see the duo take on Emma Corrin’s supervillain Cassandra Nova – the evil twin sister of Professor X.
The film will be released in theaters on July 26.
