Yahoo Lifestyle Ryan Reynolds Recalled A “Personal Meeting” With Madonna To Ask For Permission To Use “Like A Prayer” In “Deadpool & Wolverine”
Getting Madonna to let you use her music is no walk in the park — even if you’re Ryan Reynolds.
In a recent panel interview on SiriusXM, Ryan and Shawn Levy recalled the intense process of obtaining the rights to use Madonna’s 1989 hit “Like a Prayer” in their new movie, Deadpool & Wolverine, which stars Ryan and Hugh Jackman as the titular characters.
“It did involve a personal visit to Madonna, where we showed Madonna the sequence where ‘Like a Prayer’ would be used,” explained Shawn, the film’s director.
As they told the story at Hugh’s request, Ryan prefaced his recollection of the “personal meeting” by noting that the Queen of Pop is notoriously selective about granting use of her music — particularly that song, which had a three-week run at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
“Madonna doesn’t just license the song, you know, and particularly that song has not been licensed. So it was a big deal to ask for it, and certainly, a bigger deal to use it,” Ryan said, recalling that he and Shawn “went over and met with her and sort of showed her how it was being used, and where, and why.”
Shawn joked that the stakes were so high that it felt like they were heading into a meeting with “royalty,” with Ryan adding that he wasn’t even sure how to address the icon face-to-face.
“I didn’t even know. I even asked someone who worked with her. I was like, ‘Am I allowed to just say Madonna?’ Like, ‘Hello Madonna?... I’m fucking Ryan,’” he quipped, describing the whole thing as “one of the great thrills of [his] life.”
Fortunately, Madonna handed over the rights to the song, but not without giving her say on how it would be used in the movie.
“She gave a great note,” Ryan said. “My God, she watched it, and I’m not kidding, just was like, ‘You need to do this, this, and this in this moment,’ and damn it, if she wasn’t like spot on and right.”
Shawn added: “We literally went into a new recording session within 48 hours to do this one note. She had only one note, and it was a great note, and it made the sequence better.”
As luck would have it, the odds were in their favor because one of Madonna’s sons was already a fan of the Deadpool movie franchise, which began with the first movie in 2016 and a second in 2018.
“Her son is a big Deadpool fan, and she mentioned that that definitely was an advantage,” Shawn revealed.
Of course, if there’s one thing we know about Ryan, it’s that he’s undoubtedly very dedicated when it comes to Deadpool.
The 47-year-old — who famously spent a decade trying to get the first Deadpool movie off the ground — recalled in a recent interview with the New York Times that he sacrificed his salary on the first movie to pay the movie’s screenwriters out-of-pocket.
“No part of me was thinking when Deadpool was finally greenlit that this would be a success,” he said of the movie, which made over $132 million in its opening weekend and grossed more than $363 million.
“I even let go of getting paid to do the movie just to put it back on the screen: 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 writers room,” he explained, recalling that it was “a lesson in a couple of senses.”
He added: “I was just so invested in every micro-detail of it, and I hadn’t felt like that in a long, long time. I remembered wanting to feel that more — not just on Deadpool, but on anything.”
Deadpool & Wolverine hits theaters on July 26.
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