The Director of ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ on Those Spoilery Surprises

Shawn Levy explains the thinking behind specific cameos, what was saved from discarded scripts and how they made that end-credits tribute to Fox.

Though the director Shawn Levy has spent the last several months promoting his new blockbuster, “Deadpool & Wolverine,” there was so much he couldn’t say until now.

“This conversation will be tantamount to therapy for me,” Levy joked last week as he signed on to a video call to discuss cameos and plot elements that had to be kept hidden until after the film’s juggernaut opening weekend. (Major spoilers follow.)

Though trailers sold the movie as a team-up between Ryan Reynolds’s meta mercenary, Deadpool, and Hugh Jackman’s surly mutant, Wolverine, the starry supporting cast includes some big surprises, including Jennifer Garner as the assassin Elektra, Wesley Snipes as the vampire hunter Blade and Channing Tatum as the card-tossing mutant Gambit. The film’s multiverse-spanning shenanigans also allow the return of Chris Evans, who retired his Captain America character in “Avengers: Endgame” but here reprises Johnny Storm, the “Fantastic Four” character he played back when 20th Century Fox owned key pieces of the Marvel portfolio.

Levy said nearly all of those surprise cameos were hatched in Reynolds’s apartment, where much of the movie was conceived amid pie-in-the-sky brainstorming. “It was the two of us acting scenes out, passing a laptop back and forth and saying, ‘Hey, what if this?’” Levy recalled. “It invariably led to one of us texting that actor and just asking.”

Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Ryan has said that you both had trouble cracking the story before Hugh agreed to come on board. Was there anything from those early, Wolverine-less versions that you kept?