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In the modern age of superhero movie domination, comic book-accurate portrayals are a basic expectation. Nowadays fans even get upset when an actor doesn’t have the right hair color or nationality as the character that they’re portraying. Those expectations weren’t nearly as prominent back when X2: X-Men United was released in 2003. But that didn’t stop Aaron Stanford from doing his best to do justice to St. John Allerdyce, the Aussie mutant better known as Pyro in the comics.
“The movie Chopper had just come out and I loved Chopper, so I approached them with my best Mark Brandon Read accent,” Ashford tells Den of Geek, referring to Eric Bana’s character from the hit Aussie crime film. “I asked them, ‘Do you guys want him to have an Australian accent in this?’ and they were just like, ‘Absolutely not.’”
Making Pyro an American wasn’t the only change that producers and director Bryan Singer had in mind back then either. X2 introduced the mutant who would be Pyro simply by the name of “John.” John is an American student at Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, and he begins the movie flaunting his powers by taunting non-mutants. By the end of the film, John has abandoned Rogue and Bobby Drake (played by Anna Paquin and Shawn Ashmore, respectively), and joined forces with Magneto (Ian McKellen).
The heel turn works because of the freedom that writers had to buck the canon and let the movie’s version of Pyro be his own character.
“The movie gave him such an emotional throughline,” Ashford says while praising the small beats that spoke volumes of his character. “There’s a little moment when you see him looking at the photograph of someone else’s happy family on a mantle and he stares at it. And you can tell that there’s pain there. You can tell that he didn’t have a happy family.”
Although Pyro’s co-creators Chris Claremont and John Byrne certainly told interesting stories about the character, none fully explored his background before the movie. “The writing team, with Mike Dougherty and Dan Harris, gave Pyro this emotional backstory,” Santford recalls. “They do it very elegantly in these small vignettes, and that backstory didn’t exist in the comics. Dougherty and Harris really built that character.”
But that was 21 years ago. Ashford thus returns to a part he last played in 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand in a very different context and moviemaking climate. Fan expectations for comic book accuracy has become so great that not even Hugh Jackman’s beloved take on Wolverine can resist. At last, the Aussie actor is donning the much-maligned yellow spandex for Deadpool & Wolverine.
So while crafting a grounded John for the original X-Men films had its pleasures, Ashford is happy to play a more traditional supervillain in Deadpool & Wolverine.
“This is the first time Pyro has a proper superhero outfit, one specifically from the Ultimate X-Men series,” he says. More than an homage to a comic run, though, the costume reveals John’s new state of mind. “He’s gone completely mad. He’s like the Mad King wanting to burn everything. His face is scarred up from a lifetime of playing with fire and getting too close to it. He’s got these red goggles that he wears and an almost firefighter-like suit from the apocalypse. It’s an anti-firefighter suit.”
Pyro’s new costume helped Stanford make sense of his character’s new story in which he and other Marvel characters across the multiverse find themselves trapped in the Void, as introduced in the TV series Loki.
“It’s exciting to go into these enormous practical sets they built. You’re amazed as you drive into this gigantic desert wasteland they built,” says Stanford, embracing his own inner geek. Yet Stanford is a professional, and being Pyro is still work, no matter how cool the setting might be.
“Sixteen hours later, you perform the same action, you said the same line, and it can become a bit of a grind,” he says. “As weird as it sounds, there’s quite a bit of drudgery.” Still, that drudgery never became overwhelming, for which Stanford credits stars Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman and director Shawn Levy.
“They were so confident in what they were doing. They stayed in command of the film, even when improvising. Ryan Reynolds famously works in a very improvisational style, but there was never any questioning about what was going to work. They all just knew what they were doing, even when they were changing lines and trying things out.”
As outrageous as the Deadpool & Wolverine Pyro might seem, Stanford considers the character consistent from X2 and The Last Stand.
“That’s the character that we move forward from,” he says of the John seen in the earlier films. “But when we first meet him in Deadpool & Wolverine, it’s 20 years later and he’s been through a lot. You can see it mapped on his face. It’s a natural extension of the young Pyro.” In short, Stanford describes his new take on the character in one short sentence: “He’s not a nice man.”
“There was a lot of room to just have fun in Deadpool & Wolverine, to just be off the leash and not be so concerned about verisimilitude,” Stanford explains, contrasting his first portrayal of Marvel’s merry mutants with the MCU version. “The producers and creatives were really concerned about being authentic in X2 and X3 because, at that stage, they wanted to change the perception of what a comic book movie could be. They wanted to prove that a comic book film could be taken seriously and deal with weighty themes. They wanted a superhero film that was grounded in reality.”
“Deadpool is many things,” he continues, “but it’s not necessarily grounded.”
And yet, some of the trailers for Deadpool & Wolverine have shown real emotion in Hugh Jackman’s Logan, a balance that intrigues Stanford. “The interesting thing about Deadpool & Wolverine is that, as fun as it is, they really want to hit you with a one-two punch. They want you laughing and they want you sobbing.”
“You don’t see a ton of that of the pathos for my character,” Stanford clarifies, “but I tried to work some stuff in the subtext between the lines, so we’ll see if that reads and if the fans catch wind of it.”
The tonal balance seems like a difficult tightrope to walk. One would expect the greatest challenge to involve returning to the character in an era of heightened expectations, with fans who won’t accept the deviations from the comics found in the first X-Men movies.
“It was absolutely a lot of fun, full stop,” Stanford says, brushing away any suggestion that he might be intimidated by the Marvel fan base. “Because Deadpool is a lot of fun, that’s what the Deadpool movies are. There was a lot of excitement and a lot of me feeling incredibly grateful for the situation I found myself in. But there wasn’t like a tremendous weight bearing down on me, because I knew it was just gonna be a great ride.”
Deadpool & Wolverine premiers in theaters on July 26.
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