Before He Was Shazam, Zachary Levi Really Wanted To Play Deadpool
Before he donned the red padded-out suit to play the title character ofShazam!,Zachary Leviwanted to be a Marvel superhero. No, not the one that he briefly played in theThorfranchise, but a Marvel character that shares a similarly colored suit and a disposition for mouthing off. Zachary Levi revealed that his dream superhero role was Deadpool, the Merc with a Mouth currently played by Ryan Reynolds.
Zachary Levi may have been born to play Shazam, but there is one comic book character that he always dreamed of playing: Deadpool. In an interview withCinemaBlend, Levi revealed that he “wanted to play Deadpool for so long,” before Reynolds ultimately stepped into the blood-red mercenary suit.
“I wanted to be Deadpool for so long. Like a long, long [time ago]. When I was readingDeadpoolI wanted to be Deadpool, but Ryan is crushing that.”
Levi might have lost out on the role of the smart-mouthed immortal mercenary, but he’s had plenty of run-ins with the comic book world, both on the Marvel and DC side. Levi took over in the minor role of Fandral, one of the Warriors Three, inThor: The Dark Worldbefore he was unceremoniously killed inThor: Ragnarok. But that gave him the chance to land the role that he was made for: Billy Batson/Shazam in the DC movie,Shazam!
Now that he has been blessed with the wisdom of Solomon, Levi notes that he kind of got what he wanted withShazam!Reynolds is “crushing” his role as Deadpool, and Levi gets to play a character that has plenty of parallels to the Merc with a Mouth, he said:
While on paper Shazam and Deadpool couldn’t be more different, Levi has a point — the winning appeal ofShazam!, like theDeadpoolmovies, is that it exists outside of the main DCEU and has the freedom to poke fun at its most iconic superheroes.Shazam!doesn’t break the fourth wall as much asDeadpooldoes, but it does have its fun messing with the boundaries of the superhero genre. Hopefully we’ll see even more of that inShazam! 2, which doesn’t yet have an official release date, thoughBlack Adamis expected to shoot by the end of next year.
