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

Shawn Levy on the set of “Deadpool & Wolverine.” Finally getting to discuss the film’s spoilers “will be tantamount to therapy for me,” he joked.Credit…Disney

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?

A few disparate elements made it all the way through, and one of the bigger ones includes this notion of Wade going through a midlife malaise and selling used cars: This was a guy who had given up on his better self and was living a life of compromise. That survived through the Wolverine iteration of this movie, as did the imperative of having Wade’s chosen family factor in. And I remember [Paul] Wernick and [Rhett] Reese, who co-wrote the first “Deadpool” movies, pitching this idea of a Chris Evans misdirect very, very early: What if we could get Chris Evans and the audience thinks it’s Cap, but he’s actually coming back as Johnny Storm? It was such an A-plus idea that it survived every iteration of the story line.

Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds in “Deadpool & Wolverine.” The idea of each character’s legacy is central to the movie.Credit…20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios/20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios, via Associated Press

The movie pulls a surprising amount from the Marvel series “Loki,” including the Time Variance Authority, an organization that prunes errant timelines. Did the studio suggest using those elements?

We knew that the movie “Logan,” James Mangold’s masterpiece, was sacrosanct, so we weren’t going to rewrite that particular history, nor were we going to revive that iteration of Wolverine. With no prodding from Marvel, we were aware that “Loki” — which Ryan and I had both watched, I confess, sparingly at that time — used the TVA and this conceit of a bureaucratic organization that oversees the multiverse. It was this wildly convenient device to incorporate Wolverine into our movie without changing the timeline of “Logan.”

Since you’re keeping “Logan” sacrosanct, what does that allow you to do with this somewhat different variant of Wolverine?

It was Hugh Jackman who unlocked the Wolverine of this movie. A couple months after that fateful phone call in August of 2022 [coming on board], we had a draft of our screenplay and sent it to Hugh. He texted us a 13-minute voice memo, and he’d be the first to admit it was rambling and all over the place, but what it was scratching at was a fundamental question: “I love the script, guys, but what is it about this Wolverine that makes him undeniable and worthy of this movie?”

The truth is that until Hugh asked that question, we hadn’t properly answered it, and it sent us back to the writing process. That’s what led to the answer that defines this movie: It’s not just a Wolverine, it’s the worst Wolverine. That led to a really juicy investigation of what haunts this antihero such that he deems himself unlovable and unforgivable. That’s really when the movie opened up for us, and if we did our job right, we gave Hugh a chance to play depths and dimensions of Logan that he hadn’t in prior movies.

When Hugh said he wanted in, how did that change or maybe even clarify the big idea of the movie?

Clarify is exactly the right word. When Hugh came on board, we instantly started thinking about the legacy of “Logan,” and that very same day, we had a strong sense that the movie itself should be about the theme of legacy. We knew it would create a proper buddy-cop paradigm, but thematically, it opened up the whole notion that became a spinal theme for the movie. So many people have expressed surprise regarding the emotionality of the movie, both in the story itself and that Fox tribute reel that we created for the end credits, and it really all speaks to this idea of legacy.

The Fox tribute reel is surprisingly affecting, but this is also a movie that has a giant wrecked 20th Century Fox logo in the background of a major fight scene.

That logo idea occurred to me early on, and I really intended for that to be as poignant as it was comedic because, like Ryan and Hugh, I built my whole career at Fox. While I’m aware of its obsolescence in many ways, I’m also deeply indebted to its legacy. There’s that word again.

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A 13-minute voice memo from Jackman helped Levy and Reynolds crack the plot.Credit…20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios

When Hugh said yes, was there already the germ of a story you’d pitched to him?

Oh, dude, not even. Hugh wanted in regardless of story at that point — because there wasn’t one — based solely on his instinct that this could be special. There was a really healthy amount of trust in Ryan and I, his close friends for over a decade, that we would do right by his character and him.

In an early montage, we see several Wolverine variants, and one is played by Henry Cavill. What was the impetus behind that casting choice?

Can I please point out that Ryan brilliantly named Henry Cavill’s Logan “the Cavillrine”? In the case of Henry, 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.

This movie makes a strong case that no one can do Wolverine better than Hugh Jackman, but for a second there, I was willing to see what Henry would do with it.

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. 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.

Midway through the movie, we meet a band of resistance fighters that are culled from prior movies or even movies that didn’t happen. Beyond the initial jolt of recognition or surprise, what’s the thematic reasoning behind picking these specific characters?

I want to point out that if all we were going for was the “shock and awe” moment, there were 50 other cameos we could have put in. We tried to rigorously enforce discipline in ourselves by always coming back to that central theme: Who are characters in the Marvel lore who never got to put a capstone on their legacy? That led us to Elektra and Jen Garner. That led us to Wesley Snipes in a big way. With the exception of Channing as Gambit, they all connect back to that central theme of legacy and a proper ending. We knew that we wanted to have some forgotten heroes and we had a list of dozens and dozens of characters — you can imagine.

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Levy built his career at Fox, so the end-credits tribute to its movies reflects his feeling of being “deeply indebted” to the studio.Credit…Disney

Who were some of the other characters on that list that you thought about including?

We ended up name-checking a lot in one form or another. We invoke Magneto. We invoke Daredevil. We used a lot of characters on that list in variant forms in Cassandra’s hide-out, ranging from Blob to Azazel to Pyro and Sabretooth. So it was a long list, but pretty much everyone we asked said yes.

Was it a quick yes from Wesley?

Unlike Henry, Channing and Jen, Wesley wanted to hear more. Ryan and he had not been in touch for many years, and that “Blade: Trinity” movie they made together was a long time ago [2004], so Wesley wanted to hear more about the tone and the intention. When Ryan called and explained that this was coming from a place of reverence and love and a desire to properly appreciate the legacy of “Blade,” at that moment, Wesley was in.

He says, “There’s only one Blade. There’s only ever going to be one Blade.” Was that meant to be a playful jab at the “Blade” movie currently in development with Mahershala Ali?

The rule on “Deadpool” movies is only one character has self-awareness and fourth-wall access. When Wesley as Blade says it, it’s only Deadpool who can look into the camera and raise his eyebrows. We left the intent of that eyebrow wiggle somewhat ambiguous: It could mean, “You’re damn right there’s only ever going to be one Blade” or it could mean, “Oh boy, who’s going to tell him?”

Channing Tatum developed a Gambit movie for years, but it never came to fruition. On social media, he sounds grateful to have been given the opportunity to finally play the character.

Channing was visibly emotional every day on set. Sometimes it was in the form of smiling euphoria and sometimes it was tearful gratitude, but I’ve never seen an actor more grateful to be on set than Channing Tatum. I was one of several dozen directors who interviewed to direct the “Gambit” movie over a decade ago, and the first time Ryan and I pitched Kevin Feige [the Marvel Studios president] the idea, we had to explain it a bit because this isn’t a capstone to legacy: This is a zig when all the other characters were zagging. It also gave an opportunity to cut against the grain of the other characters, because Gambit’s experience is diametrically different than all the other legends.

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Levy said he and Reynolds brainstormed pie-in-the-sky ideas like the surprise cameos: “It was the two of us acting scenes out, passing a laptop back and forth and saying, ‘Hey, what if this?’” Credit…20th Century Studios/Marvel, via Associated Press

Marvel movies often end in a way that sets up future films. “Deadpool & Wolverine” doesn’t really do that, not even in the closing credits.

It was a founding principle of this movie, so fundamental to our intent that in early versions of the opening voice-over, he actually says, “Let me just say right now, this is a Marvel movie that isn’t a commercial for any other Marvel movies.” The commitment to a self-contained, single story was bedrock for Ryan and me, and never once was there an ounce of pushback from Marvel.

The closing-credits montage of Fox’s Marvel movies could have just been a highlight reel, taking the best footage from the best films. But it even includes several movies that were poorly received, like the 2015 version of “Fantastic Four.”

We wanted that tribute reel to be reflective of the entirety of the Marvel-Fox legacy, so that meant hits, flops and everything in between. Ryan and myself and our co-editors toiled over that for months and said to all our teammates, “What sticks with you, regardless of where these movies sit on Rotten Tomatoes or cumulative box office?” Once we had an edit of that reel, thus began a multimonth process of getting person-by-person permission to use each and every one of those hundred-plus clips.

Were some of those actors surprised or even touched that you were using this footage?

Both. Some people approved it on the basis of trust that it would be well-intentioned and warmhearted. There were many others who wanted to see the reel just to feel firsthand the vibe of it and the context where they’d be used. It took months and a lot of different people working all the angles, many of which fell to Ryan and me reaching out to actors personally because time was running out and the conventional channels weren’t getting it done fast enough. So it really was not only a labor of love to edit, it gave us occasion to reach out to many of the actors who are also a part of that history.