Hollywood is living through “the friggin’ salad days,” as Ryan Reynolds puts it, after experiencing the biggest summer at the box office since COVID, thanks to blockbusters like “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” and “The Odyssey.” Last month, the “Deadpool” star personally congratulated the cast and crew of “The Odyssey” for surpassing “Deadpool & Wolverine” to become the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time.
“Obviously, [‘The Odyssey’] is an incredible, incredible movie. Christopher Nolan literally breathes the rarest air on Earth. He’s a singular filmmaker,” Reynolds told Variety at the “Mayday” premiere at AMC Lincoln Square in New York City on Tuesday night. “I mean, Matt Damon, Tom Holland, who’s clearly batting a thousand stars with Zendaya. I just love that people are going to the movie theaters. I don’t even care why or for what reason. Just go to the movie theaters. There’s no better shared experience.”
Apple Original Films’ “Mayday” marks Reynolds’ first major movie role since “Deadpool & Wolverine” hit theaters more than two years ago. Set at the end of the Cold War, he stars as a U.S. Navy pilot who becomes trapped behind enemy lines and forms an unlikely friendship with an eccentric ex-KGB agent (Kenneth Branagh) who idolizes ’80s American culture. Reynolds believes that the rosy-colored nostalgia surrounding the decade, popularized in modern-day projects like “Stranger Things,” tends to gloss over the more turbulent nature of the era.
“When you get far enough away from a time period that’s quite distinct, there’s always a lovely feeling associated with it, almost like you pave over all the trauma with puppy dogs and ice cream,” Reynolds said. “The 80s was a brutal, brutal time for people. It was a fucking mess and people forget that.”
Reynolds was quick to point to the fear of nuclear war that lingered over Americans as U.S.-Soviet tensions surged again in the early ’80s. The decade also saw the decline of American manufacturing devastate many working-class communities, along with the AIDS epidemic, which became the country’s most urgent health crisis.
“It was a tremendous strife,” Reynolds explained. “Socio political tensions everywhere. We were still pretty fresh off a Cuban missile crisis, which was only 15-20 years before. It’s a tumultuous period, but you look back at it now and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. ‘Top Gun.’ Cocaine!’ Like, ‘No!’ It was really scary.”
When the time comes to dissect the 2020’s in decades to come, Reynolds predicts that creatives will “pick on the big ticket items that didn’t really leave the footprint culturally that you would think they would.”
“So much of the aughts were like a mix of all the decade’s previous, whereas the decade’s previous were their own thing. I wonder if it’s going to be the Covid era or something. I have no idea. We are living in the friggin’ salad days right now! We just don’t know it.”
While “Mayday” isn’t getting a theatrical release, Reynolds teased at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con that he could return as Deadpool later this year in Marvel’s “Avengers: Doomsday.” Reynolds snuck into the Marvel presentation at Hall-H in a grey denim Deadpool suit and asked Paul Rudd a question from the crowd: “Mr. Paul Rudd: where is Thor, and why was he crying?”
Branagh, who also directed the first “Thor” movie with Chris Hemsworth in 2011, says Reynolds never brought up the ongoing Thor gag while filming together on “Mayday.”
“He worries about offending me, that’s what it is,” Branagh joked. “That was my baby, you know! Way back before you came in.”
“Mayday” releases on Apple TV Sept. 4.
