Deadpool 2's Josh Brolin on How He Prepared to Play Cable

CBR

Deadpool 2: Brolin's Personal Approach to Cable's Convoluted History

By Renaldo Matadeen

Published May 18, 2018

Josh Brolin speaks to CBR about the approach he took in portraying Cable and just how much of the source material factored into his role.

WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Deadpool 2, in theaters now.

Cable has one of the most convoluted backstories in comic books, going from heroic X-Man to mutant antihero at times, which made fans all the more interested to see which version Josh Brolin would be depicting in Deadpool 2.

Well, the actor has made it clear that he did have to streamline his approach to the character, all while sifting through tons of comic history and making his portrayal a bit more personal so that it could be properly translated to the big screen.

At the movie's press junket, when asked by CBR’s Albert Ching (full interview can be viewed below) if he dipped into the source material for the role, he said: "I did, because anything, even if there's not a convoluted past or history to something that you're researching, you don't take it literally straight through. You don't go, 'I'm just going to do this, and that's it, and it's all written out.

"You kind of take pieces of it, and you personalize it, and you make it yours. So there's something, even though it's convoluted, even though he has so many different looks -- white hair, and a beard, and no beard, and streaks of white, where that is in the trajectory of who drew it, who was writing it at the time -- I felt free to kind of make it my own." Brolin even admitted he gained wisdom from artist Rob Liefeld on how to position the soldier.

In David Leitch's movie, Cable is given a simpler backstory as opposed to being the time-traveling son of Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor (a clone Mister Sinister made of Jean Grey) from the comics. Here, he's merely a time-traveler who wanted to come to the present to kill Russell aka Firefist (Julian Dennision), the boy who'd grow up to kill his family in the future.

However, there wasn't any link to the Summers family or the techno-organic virus directly that's ravaging his body, definitely leaving room for future Cable stories to be told, even if it's with X-Force.

In theaters Friday nationwide, director David Leitch’s Deadpool 2 stars Ryan Reynolds as the titular Deadpool, Morena Baccarin as Vanessa, T.J. Miller as Weasel, Leslie Uggams as Blind Al, Brianna Hildebrand as Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Stefan Kapičić as Colossus, Zazie Beetz as Domino, Julian Dennison as Russell, and Josh Brolin as Cable.