Ryan Reynolds may be the greatest actor of his generation.
Look at Deadpool – can you imagine anyone else playing the Merc with a Mouth? Don’t you secretly believe Reynolds has a weapons dungeon full of katanas and the ability to regenerate his own legs?
So when it came to playing a wise-cracking two-foot furball in the noir-and-bizarre Detective Pikachu, Reynolds really went full method.
To the point where he neglected his family.
This short featurette stars Reynolds in Serious Actor Glasses, talking about his process.
“As many of you know, I vanish into my roles,” he says.
“I lived it. I breathed it. I became the character. I spent the entire year as Detective Pikachu.”
“I lived at his height. I tried to lose 182 pounds to match his weight until doctors intervened.”
Artistically shot black-and-white stills show Reynolds crawling around in order to get into the mind of the Pokemon super-sleuth.
“This is a funny anecdote: I was on my way to pick up my daughters from school when I heard that I got the role,” he says.
“Well, I didn’t show up at school. Because Detective Pikachu, he doesn’t know who those two little girls are.”
Cut to a shot of Reynolds’ exasperated wife, Blake Lively:
“They’re our daughters. He just- he just left them.”
Lively’s actually the real star of this promo, undercutting Ryan’s pretensions at every cutaway. She plays it completely straight, as though Detective Pikachu is an ill-advised hobby he’s been playing at in the garage, and no, honey, the family will not be drinking your home brewed ginger beer.
“I mean, he didn’t even change his voice. It just sounds like him,” she says, baffled.
Lively and Reynolds are constantly roasting each other in public, but roping her in on promos like this is next level.
Detective Pikachu seems like it’s banking heavily on Reynolds’ snarky persona to carry off the wild premise of Pikachu-as-noir-anti-hero in a world of horrifyingly realistic 3D Pokemon. (Did you SEE that Lickitung?)
Because it will only work if it has a sense of humour about itself – which means meta promos like this are a good sign.
“Acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances” – Sanford Meisner. Point is, there’s a new Detective Pikachu trailer tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/g9dRTOJHL1
— Ryan Reynolds (@VancityReynolds) February 25, 2019