Ryan Reynolds faces fears in “Green Lantern”
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Unlike another superhero from DC Comics, Green Lantern doesn’t get to duck into a phone booth and open his shirt to reveal his superhero costume beneath.
“In the mythology of the film, the suit is made of pure energy,” said Ryan Reynolds, who plays Green Lantern. “So there’s no actual suit, because that would burn. What I’m wearing is a motion-capture suit, with tracking marks and tracking dots and those sorts of things. It was a little bizarre. I sort of looked like a crash test dummy who lost his Volvo.”
The suit became especially difficult to wear as filming continued into August in New Orleans, he said.
But Reynolds said he was impressed when he first saw the suit in motion in test footage about six weeks into shooting.
“It was just incredible to see that thing in motion and moving around,” he said.
Reynolds does a lot of moving around in “Green Lantern,” including doing acrobatic maneuvers high in the air.
“My third day of shooting, they fired me up in the air a couple of hundred feet, 60 feet a second … it was just a mind-boggling experience,” he said.
“Right when you arc at the very top of this ride, I’ll call it, you’re weightless for a couple of seconds. … there’s a cameraman right above me,” he said.
Reynolds dealt with his weightlessness in an unusual way.
“Somewhere in the back of my subconscious, I’d scream out ’80s sitcom characters,” he said. “I’d yell, ‘Alan Thicke! Judith Light!’ And we’d go back down.”
Director Martin Campbell (“Goldeneye,” “Casino Royale”) helped push Reynolds through the often-difficult filming.
“Martin Campbell is notorious for pushing everyone. You’ll have done a stunt you can’t believe you’ve completed — you’ll literally want them to show you the film back so you can put it on your epitaph — and then Martin will come up to you and say, ‘Let’s do it again, full speed.’”
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