Ryan Reynolds as Guy in Free Guy. © 2020 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved
Ryan Reynolds has swapped Deadpool’s red suit and mask for a blue shirt and khakis to play a very different kind of hero in Free Guy – something the Canadian actor says was a whole lot of fun.
“There’s something really fun about exploring everything with new eyes, which is what this character gets to do, and sort of filtering that through the prism of comedy and occasionally cynicism and all sorts of other things,” says Reynolds during a virtual press conference.
“I love playing characters sort of stepping out of the background into this new person.”
Stepping out of the background is exactly what happens to Reynolds’ Guy, a bank teller who blissfully goes about his mundane routine as an NPC (non-playable character), until he meets Molotovgirl (Jodie Comer) and realizes he’s a background character in a violent open-world video game called “Free City.”
With the knowledge that everything he’s known isn’t real, Guy starts changing the rules of the game and becomes an unlikely hero known as “Blue Shirt Guy.” But not everyone is on board with Guy’s growing popularity. Taika Waititi’s Antwan, the narcissistic head of Soonami Studios that distributes “Free City,” will do anything it takes to stop him.
Telling a fresh, original story was something that appealed to Reynolds, who is also a producer on the film, even though he knew creating a whole new world would be challenging.
“It’s hard to make a new movie, it’s hard to make something that isn’t based on some pre-existing IP or a comic book or a sequel in some regard,” says Reynolds.
He sent the script to director and fellow Canadian Shawn Levy (the pair had been wanting to work together for a while), and it wasn’t long before they met up to discuss how to bring the story to life.
Levy says it was challenging to make a movie about gaming that would also appeal to non-gamers.
“Getting that right was really important but it was also important to make a movie that required no gaming fluency from a viewer who wasn’t a gamer and just wanting to make a movie that was warm and funny and romantic and enjoyable as both,” says Levy.
Reynolds believes they found the right balance and insists this is not a “video game movie.”
“It’s sort of like saying Titanic is a movie about boatmanship. It’s not. It’s a movie about so much more but I loved the narrow target we had to hit to create a world that felt so authentic to gamers and still sort of smuggle this other story into. That was a pretty special kind of thing,” he says.
Jodie Comer as Molotovgirl and Ryan Reynolds as Guy. @2021 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved. For Comer, Free Guy is much more than an action-adventure film and the very reason she wanted to play Molotovgirl, known as Millie in real life.
“I think it was just the scope of it and how much heart it had. You see it written down a lot like it’s an action-comedy, but I just feel like there was so much more to that,” says Comer.
Lil Rel Howery, who plays Guy’s best friend Buddy, a security guard at Free City Bank, agrees and says early reaction to the film validates that.
“You see all the action stuff when you see the trailers, but I think it’s shocking people that oh I didn’t know I was going to tear up,” says Howery.
Rounding out the cast are Joe Keery as Soonami programmer Keys and Utkarsh Ambudkar as Mouser, a Soonami coder tasked with removing Guy from the game, on the orders of Antwan.
For Waititi, playing the greedy mogul Antwan was a refreshing change.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” says Waititi. “Shawn described the character and that appealed to me because I feel like my characters usually are quite nice. I just play versions of my mom in all my characters and so this was a version of my mom who had not grown up I suppose. Bit of a control freak.”
(L-R) Taika Waititi as Antwan, Utkarsh Ambudkar as Mouser and Joe Keery as Keys. Photo by Alan Markfield. © 2020 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.After Free Guy was pushed back more than a year due to the pandemic, Levy is excited for audiences to finally experience the film.
“This cast come to life in a movie that feels in some ways like an antidote to much of what we’ve been living through in that the movie is about hopefulness and the preservation of some innocence in the midst of a very cynical world and championing that hopefulness and that optimism,” says Levy.
And he adds it definitely needs to be experienced in a movie theatre.
“We tried to make a big new original movie with spectacle and scope and big heart and that those things are really experienced most on that big canvas and big screen.”
Free Guy opens in Cineplex Theatres Aug. 13