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Movies & TV

10th Aug 2021

Free Guy features a huge Hollywood star we haven’t seen on the big screen in YEARS

Rory Cashin

We didn’t realise how much we missed this megastar until we got to see them again on the big screen!

There are certain kinds of movies that naturally lend themselves to having a lot of surprises.

Be they cameos or easter eggs or sly nods towards other movies/shows/characters, etc., they can be a lot of fun for fans to spot throughout, and Free Guy is very much one of those movies.

The big budget action-comedy sees Ryan Reynolds star as a character in a video game, one that is sort of a mix between Grand Theft Auto and Fortnite, who suddenly comes to realise that there is more to the world than the digital creation around him.

You can check out our full review here, but one thing we didn’t mention in that review were the brilliant cameos that are littered throughout. We’re not going to spoil them here, but if you know anything about Ryan Reynolds, then you can probably guess who one or two of them are.

However, there is one in particular that comes out of absolutely nowhere, and we were so pleasantly surprised to see. It was something we had to ask director Shawn Levy about when we chatted to him in the run-up to the movie’s release.

Check out our full interview with Levy right here:

Joe talked to the director about having to curb Reynolds’ more adult-aimed humour for this family-friendly movie, as well as the latest on those Deadpool 3 rumours, we asked Levy specifically about this one particular cameo.

It involves a big name Hollywood star who (we checked) hasn’t actually shown his face on the big screen since 2017, and he effectively opens this new movie!

This is what Levy told us about that surprise:

“There are several surprise cameos. Some are humans, some are objects. But several surprises in Free Guy. There is a third act cameo by another movie star, that was unexpected and it was an idea that had to be him.

“But as far as the movie star that opens the movie, and who we’ve kept more or less secret, the character existed but once we cast the movie star that you’re talking about that hasn’t been on screen in a few years, he showed up on set, and he had such a sense of playfulness.

“And he made choices, especially in the big scene that he later has with Ryan Reynolds, that were so strange, and were so not in the script! Where you have one mega male movie star getting very much in the space of Ryan Reynolds, [another] mega male movie star.

“And it gives this element to the scene that is so bizarre. I was literally remember watching it and going ‘Why is this happening?’, and yet I kept laughing. And it reminded me that sometimes the best comedy comes out of something that doesn’t make sense and is completely idiosyncratic, weird and surprising.”

Free Guy is released in Irish cinemas on Friday, 13 August.

Clip via 20th Century Studios

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