Deadpool Originally Had A Fishbowl Head In First Movie?
Ryan Reynolds' double in X-Men Origins: Wolverine says one of the scrapped designs for the character had him wearing a fishbowl apparatus on his head.
Even with the depressing news that Ryan Reynolds won’t be able to improvise any lines during the film thanks to the writer’s strike, fans are understandably excited about seeing his “merc with a mouth” paired with Wolverine in Deadpool 3. Of course, Reynolds first played Wade Wilson in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, even though he looked nothing like his comics counterpart in the flop. But it could have been worse: actor Scott Adkins, who was a Deadpool double, told ComicBook.com that one design producers considered was “Deadpool with a fish bowl on his head.”
He didn’t really elaborate on this, and we’re still not sure why they considered putting a fishbowl on the character’s head…he would have looked more like the Spider-Man villain Mysterio than Deadpool. We do agree with Adkins’ assessment that this would have looked even worse than the final version we got, which inexplicably removed Deadpool’s mouth and turned a wisecracking and colorful character into a grim murder machine. Fortunately, Adkins provided one heartwarming detail about the production of the film that may make you fall in love with Ryan Reynolds all over again.
According to Adkins (who most recently appeared in the kickass epic John Wick 4), “Ryan [Reynolds] wasn’t even there by the time we shot the Deadpool stuff” because he was presumably off doing other work. However, Reynolds was “really annoyed” as soon as “he saw what they were gonna do” with the character. This was when Adkins intervened on Reynolds’ behalf and went to see the different ideas on the table and just how bad they might have been, and in retrospect, he’s grateful that they didn’t go with a fishbowl/head design that would have looked even worse.
If you’re scratching your head wondering why this unconventional Marvel character would even need some kind of bowl on his head, don’t waste your time. The most notable thing about Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine is he bore almost no resemblance to his comic character, with him being a kind of final boss that had the combined powers of several different mutants. This was even given as the reason for his name, as he is effectively a “pool” of powers collected from other mutants, and if you’ve never seen this Hollywood trainwreck of a film, trust us: all of this is even stupider to watch than we are making it sound.
After that movie flopped, it seemed unlikely that we would ever see Deadpool again, and even less likely that he would headline his own successful film franchise. But Ryan Reynolds continued to believe in the character, and he gave his “maximum effort” when suiting up to shoot some test footage that apparently wasn’t enough to win over Fox executives.
But the film got the greenlight after the test footage was leaked online and won over fans everywhere, and considering that the leaker has never been named (with Reynolds jokingly calling him “an absolute bastard”), many assume it was Reynolds himself who sidestepped Hollywood execs to finally bring his passion project to life.
