Hugh Jackman is ready to put on a show for any audience — including his friend and costar Ryan Reynolds’ children.
In a SiriusXM interview on Friday, July 19, Reynolds, 47, revealed that he walked in on his fellow Deadpool & Wolverine costar, 55, performing hits from The Greatest Showman with his kids.
“This is a true story, I’m not making this up,” Reynolds explained. “I’ve come in, I’ve heard The Greatest Showman playing, and I come around the corner, and there [are] my kids watching the movie, singing along. And there’s Hugh acting it out with them, like, just this big kid.”
Reynolds recalled the impromptu scene as one of “the most heartbreaking, beautiful things I’d ever seen,” adding that Jackman has outperformed him in both musicals and as a father. “I knew I would never be able to top [him], so I started a new life,” he joked. “So I’ve started a new life in a new country with a secret family.”
According to Reynolds, his kids watch the 2017 musical, starring Jackman as P. T. Barnum, “all the time.” (Reynolds shares daughters Betty, James, and Inez, as well as and a fourth baby whose name has not been revealed, with wife Blake Lively.)
Deadpool & Wolverine will see Reynolds and Jackman reunite as their respective characters since 2009’s Wolverine: Origins. The movie will mark the introduction of the X-Men to the Disney-owned Marvel Cinematic Universe after the company purchased 20th Century Fox, under which the first two Deadpool films were distributed.
“It’s not like adding Hugh Jackman to a movie like this is a hard sell. It’s an immediate and emphatic, unqualified yes,” Reynolds said in a November 2022 interview with Collider. “It’s a lot of moving parts and Fox and X-Men and all that kind of stuff that Marvel needs to sort through. A lot of red tape in order to make that happen. And they did it.”
The Greatest Showman will be referenced in the upcoming R-rated venture from Marvel Studios, though how it is referenced will be a “surprise.”
While Reynolds’ kids are already fans of Uncle Hugh’s movies, Reynolds confirmed in a Monday, July 15, interview with The New York Times that Deadpool & Wolverine has received his daughter James’ stamp of approval.
“Well, I’m not saying other people should do this, but my 9-year-old watched the movie with me and my mom, who’s in her late 70s, and it was just one of the best moments of this whole experience for me,” Reynolds told the outlet. “Both of them were laughing their guts out, were feeling the emotion where I most desperately hoped people would be.”
Deadpool & Wolverine is set to hit theaters on July 26.
