Talking to The New York Times, the Hollywood actor explained that he fought hard to have the Deadpool film made after X-Men spin-off, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, was poorly received. The Hugh Jackman-led Wolverine film was Deadpool’s first appearance on the big screen.

The first Deadpool film was released in 2016 after Reynolds spent over a decade to get it made, all with a $58 million budget.

The Green Lantern actor said that he personally paid for his writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick to be on set, which meant he went without a salary for the first film.

“No part of me was thinking when Deadpool was finally greenlit that this would be a success,” Reynolds told The New York Times.

“I even let go of getting paid to do the movie just to put it back on the screen,” he added.

“They wouldn’t allow my co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick on set, so I took the little salary I had left and paid them to be on set with me so we could form a de facto writer’s room.”

He added that making the first Deadpool film had been “a lesson in a couple of senses” about working with minimal resources.

“I think one of the great enemies of creativity is too much time and money,” he said.

“And that movie had neither time nor money. It really fostered focusing on character over spectacle, which is a little harder to execute in a comic-book movie.”

“I was just so invested in every micro-detail of it and I hadn’t felt like that in a long, long time,” the star continued.

“I remembered wanting to feel that more — not just on Deadpool, but on anything.”

Deadpool & Wolverine is set to hit screens on July 26, 2024.