Nathan Fillion is set to become a pivotal part of the new DCU after Superman, but the actor also has a long history with the MCU, including a cameo in last year's box office hit Deadpool and Wolverine.
"Ryan [Reynolds] would text me and say, 'Hey, would you do me a favor?' Like I'm doing him a favor," he said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. "We recorded a bunch of different stuff. We started at one character, then we moved over to being Headpool, and then we were futzing the jokes."
In the third Deadpool movie, Headpool arrives along with many other Deadpool variants. The titular superhero played by Reynolds and Hugh Jackman's Wolverine fight the group, known as the Deadpool Corps, in one of the most epic sequences of the film.
Fillion told EW that he actually recorded his Headpool lines at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We did a lot of stuff that never made it to the movie, but then there came a day where they asked me to go down the street and record it in an official recording booth. Shawn Levy, the director, called me just before I was about to leave the house and he said, 'We're all listening to your recordings that you sent us, and we don't really see any reason to rerecord these.' I considered it a real compliment that my recording booth was movie quality," he recalled.
Headpool is not the first character Fillion plays in the Deadpool saga.
"I was actually in the first Deadpool. My scene got cut out," he revealed, recalling his brief role as the towel guy at the strip club where Vanessa (played by Morena Baccarin) worked. "You'll have to remember I was filming Castle at the time. It had to be a very small part, and I requested that I be unrecognizable. It's in a deleted scenes thing. I think you can get it if you buy the movie digitally," he added.
He almost got a role in Deadpool 2 too. "He [Ryan Reynolds] asked me to come in and audition for something in the second Deadpool, which was very generous of him," Fillion said.
"We're still in touch. He's a very generous man, and he's very interested in sharing the wealth, honestly. He's got so many incredible opportunities, and he likes to remember his friends and spread those opportunities around," he said.
Beyond Deadpool, Fillion played parts in all three Guardians of the Galaxy movies, directed by James Gunn – he played an alien inmate at the high-security space prison in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1, a fictional actor in a deleted scene for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and the head of security at the Orgoscope biotech company in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
Now, the actor has debuted in the DCU's Superman as Guy Gardner, one of the members of the Green Lantern Corps, and he is set to appear in Peacemaker season 2 next month.
For more about DC, head on over to our guides on upcoming DC movies and DCU Chapter One: Gods and Monsters. If you've watched Superman already, dive into our breakdowns of Superman Easter eggs and the Superman post-credits scenes.
