Henry Cavill was in it to win it, but winning came at a queasy cost.
The 41-year-old British actor was one of dozens of surprise cameos in Marvel's Deadpool & Wolverine, playing a variant of Wolverine.
Director Shawn Levy said in a New York Times interview published on August 5 that Cavill, who is no stranger to the superhero franchise having played Superman in the DC Extended Universe, got sick from inhaling cigar smoke all day long filming his short scene in the Deadpool threequel.
Levy was impressed at the actor's level of commitment leaning into his role as Wolverine.
The filmmaker recalled:
"I think we all were, including poor Henry Cavill, who not only had that pumped-up muscular body but kept that cigar lit and in his mouth for the entirety of the shoot day."
Levy added:
“I remember hearing the next day that Henry was sick to his stomach because he had been inhaling cigar smoke for eight hours straight, but never once did he waver.”
People were flabbergasted after checking the math.
What moviegoers may be unaware of is the fact that many scenes, regardless of their short duration in the final cut, can easily take an entire day to shoot based on the number of takes and angles required.
Setting up shots for complicated action sequences in such behemoth productions as Marvel films can also be extremely tedious and can take a long time.
Actors are expected to faithfully duplicate specified actions in every take, which in Cavill's case, included having a lit cigar in his mouth the whole time.
Cavill's scene occurs when Wade Wilson/Deadpool, played by Ryan Reynolds, briefly encounters him while zipping across the multiverse in search of an alternate universe variant of Logan—a.k.a. Wolverine—to restore his deteriorating timeline due to the death of the stabilizing "anchor being" that was Logan.
Cavill's Marvel appearance followed the end of his run playing the Man of Steel in DCEU films from 2013 to 2023 after James Gunn and Peter Safran became the new DC Studios executives.
Levy recalled the moment he learned of the announcement that 31-year-old David Corenswet would play the young Clark Kent in the upcoming Superman reboot by James Gunn.
Levy told the news outlet:
"It was not long after everything went down with DC, and word came that Henry was being replaced as Superman."
"Given that Deadpool is in constant conversation with culture, it felt like a great opportunity to first of all cast Henry Cavill in a part that he would kick ass at, but also to poke fun at that other comic-book-founded movie studio and play with some self-awareness there."
Levy said in a separate interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that Cavill was a "trooper" and that "He was fabulous" on set to work with.
Fans weighed in on Cavill's dedication to the small cameo.
Cigar aficionados had some thoughts.
While Cavill didn't explain his method acting where smoking cigars is concerned, he did joke on Instagram:
"To be safe, I shaved the moustache off for this one. Just the mustache."
His facial hair reference was a nod to when Warner Bros. unconvincingly removed the actor's mustache using CGI in select scenes from 2017’s Justice League, which left audiences questioning the unnatural appearance of his invisi-stache.
The exhilarating Deadpool & Wolverine sequence originally had three Wolverine variants, but "Cavillrine" was always part of the original plan, according to Shane Reid, one of the editors of the film.
Reid recalled first working on the less interesting vision for the scene:
“There was mini Wolfie, Patch, and Cavillrine, and the idea originally [was] he walks right into mini Wolfie and leaves, and then he’s into Cavillrine, and that’s kind of it."
"I think Patch was the third one. And I actually started putting that sequence together and I had a couple of different tracks on it at first and it wasn’t very appetizing."
"It was almost like, ‘What is this sequence?’ Like we’re not committing to seeing these Wolverines, but we’re kind of jumping into it.”
The roadblock came during last year's drawn-out writer's strike, followed by the SAG/AFTRA actor's strike.
Reid and fellow editor Dean Zimmerman continued editing and, at one point, pulled Levy and Reynolds—the latter of which also co-produced and co-wrote the script—aside for a convo.
Said Reid:
“Dean and I really went to Shawn and Ryan and went ‘Guys, there’s so much more we can do with this, but like we need at least three more variants to be able to sort of weave this story together and have this fun montage.’”
He continued:
“And so Shawn and Ryan, being the amazing creative partners that they are, trusted Dean and I.”
“We had a storyboard artist find us like 10 more Wolverines. We were like, ‘If we’re going to do it now, let’s go deep cut. Like if you’re playing one dude in the audience who knows that one insert on that comic, let’s do that.’ "
"And we ended up finding Old Man Logan, the crucifixion with the X was just a really cool image, and the John Byrne brown and tan, which brought out the Hulk, which we were able to do."
"So we built that with storyboards and then Ryan would record dialogue, saying like, ‘That’s going to need coconut oil’ et cetera, and we wove that together and felt good about it. ”
While the creative ideas had all been fleshed out, bringing them to life would be an entirely different process, but the strike allowed the team to reassess the production schedule moving forward.
“When we went back into production, we were able to get rid of a few things we were going to shoot that we felt like we didn’t need anymore because we’d exhausted the dailies,” said Reid, adding:
“And so we were able to fold that into production and not expand it, but get us three more to work with. And then you get that sequence.”
The final result was an exciting montage set to the tune of Huey Lewis and the News' iconic song, "The Power of Love," also selected by Reid.
“It was just in my playlist and it felt like a perfect fit as far as, you know, time travel and bringing something back that was just inherently nostalgic for everybody. But also just funny and out of left field," said Reid.
Deadpool & Wolverine is full of Easter eggs and dozens of other fun Hollywood cameos, given the flexibility of the film's reliance on the multiverse.
Much to the delight of surprised MCU fans, some actors revisited their superhero characters, including Chris Evans reprising a familiar Marvel character—but not one you'd expect, Jennifer Garner as Elektra—a role she was last seen playing in the superhero's titular movie in 2005, and Wesley Snipes, who broke two Guinness World Records with the longest career as a live-action Marvel character playing Blade.
