To this day, the only comic book superhero that Ryan Reynolds has played in live-action is Green Lantern. Sure, he showed up as a vampire hunter in “Blade: Trinity” and as Wade Wilson in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” but in neither of those films did he play a superhero — and no, despite the fact that he fights for the side of good for the most part, Deadpool isn’t actually a superhero. Of course, this wasn’t for lack of trying. For years, Reynolds was attached to play Wally West/The Flash in a live-action solo feature, but that project failed to hit the ground running. Incidentally, when the actor was first offered “Green Lantern,” he wasn’t exactly head-over-heels.
“When I went to the meeting, I was entirely cynical,” Reynolds told MTV in 2009. “I thought, ‘What the hell, I’ll see what they have to say,’ and I left the room with a completely different perspective.” Reynolds was impressed with director Martin Campbell’s vision for the character and enticed by the massive scale of the Green Lantern mythos. He was even on board with the CGI suit idea in the beginning, which ended up becoming one of the most-mocked aspects of the film due to its jarring appearance. When “Green Lantern” failed, it took a while for Reynolds to recover, with the project hanging over him in Hollywood. “I represented the death of the superhero for a while,” he said in 2016 (via Variety). “After ‘Green Lantern,’ I was pretty much unhirable.”
