SPOILER WARNING! Here’s how that major movie star wound up playing a superhero for the very first time.
*Spoilers below for Deadpool 2.*
Deadpool 2 is chockablock with arterial spray and jokes about male genitals and cameos, oh, sweet, sweet surprise cameos! There is the current bench of X-Men -- Nicholas Hoult's Beast and Evan Peters' Quicksilver, among other, avoiding Deadpool at the X-Mansion -- and Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, kind of. (More on that later.)
Then there's the big ass chimichanga of a cameo, which I earmarked in my review when I said that one actor pops up so briefly you can only assume you were mistaken. Nope! That is Brad f**king Pitt, appearing in his first ever superhero movie -- as an invisible superhero.
It's something of joke on a joke, or a setup and the punchline, beginning when Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is auditioning recruits for his newly formed "super duper f**king group," X-Force, and accepts Vanisher, a mutant whose gag is that you never see him throughout his time onscreen, only a seemingly empty headshot or floating skydiving harness. Until X-Force parachutes into a mission, that is, and due to high winds, nearly every single member of the team meets a grisly end. Vanisher gets tangled in telephone wires and, as he's being electrocuted to death, for one split second, we finally see his face -- which happens to be one of the most famous faces in the world.
"The power of just asking," Reynolds told ET's Carly Steel at the movie's premiere of how he convinced Pitt to make the cameo. "Just ask, you never know!"
It helps that director David Leitch has a history with Pitt. "It was definitely a surreal moment because I had worked with him in the past," he explained of acting as Pitt's stunt double on such films as Fight Club and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. "I never thought I'd be directing him. He's a mentor and a friend and I love him, so it was great."
Pitt almost played an even larger role in the sequel: Cable, the time-traveling robot assassin. "He was incredibly interested in the property," Leitch previously told ComicBook.com. "Things didn't work out schedule-wise." That role ultimately went to Josh Brolin, and now Pitt is Vanisher. And that's canon.
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