Ryan Reynolds: Shooting 'Green Lantern' 'weirdest experience'

07/26/2010 by Corinne Heller

Ryan Reynolds says filming The Green Lantern was "the weirdest experience ever," mostly because his costume is half-virtual.

"Technically, I am not in that costume," Reynolds said. "The costume is a motion capture suit. So what it is, effectively, the suit comes out of the character, I mean, it's a biological manifestation of the ring bearer's will and imaginations so for every Green Lantern in the movie, it's different. Same symbol but different suit."

"And I wasn't going to actually let them rip a suit out of my internal organs and wrap around my body. Although I really wanted the movie, so I might have considered it early on but now we're in," he said.

Green Lantern, based on the popular DC Comics superhero, is set to hit theaters on June 17, 2011. Unlike many films, most scenes with special effects involved are not filmed in front of a green screen, for obvious reasons.

"Because I'm the Green Lantern, we can't have green screen, clearly, because it would just be a floating head. It's blue screen," Reynolds said. "It's amazing, too. You spend a few weeks in a gigantic blue room, and I'm telling you, you walk out of there and you can't actually feel your life. It is the weirdest experience ever."

Green Lantern also stars Blake Lively, who plays Serena on the hit CW series Gossip Girl, as Jordan's love interest Carol Ferris as well as Peter Sarsgaard, who plays his enemy Hector Hammond.

"Oh my gosh, it's so cool," Lively said. "I can't wait to be a villain. It was so much fun to get to shoot a movie like this. We shoot for 110 days yet most of the movie doesn't take place until after we're done, in the post-production. So I'm just as excited to see the movie as everyone else because it'll be a surprise to me."

The director is Martin Campbell, who directed the 2010 Mel Gibson film Edge of Darkness, the James Bond movie Casino Royale in 2006 and the 1998 film The Mask of Zorro and its 2003 sequel.

Michael Goldenberg, Brothers & Sisters writer and producer Greg Berlanti, Michael Green and Marc Guggenheim penned the screenplay for Green Lantern, while the latter three have also been tapped to write The Green Lantern 2, which is in development and has not been given a release date.

Reynolds recently suffered a minor injury while training for the film off its sets and has since been back to work and production was not affected, Entertainment Weekly said. Reynolds was cast as the Green Lantern last year after beating out Bradley Cooper and Jared Leto, who went through two rounds of screen tests, according to Us Weekly magazine.

Reynolds played Wade Wilson, aka Deadpool, in the film X-Men Origins: Wolverine alongside Hugh Jackman in 2009 and the title character in the 2002 comedy film Van Wilder, which starred Tara Reid. He also starred in the sitcom Two Guys and a Girl from 1998 to 2001.

The actor, who married actress Scarlet Johansson in Canada in 2008, began his career on Canadian television, starring in shows such as the teen soap opera Hillside, also called Fifteen, in 1990 and the sci-fi teen series The Odyssey.

Check out the video interview with Ryan Reynolds, carried out recently at Comic-Con 2010 in San Diego, California by George Pennacchio of KABC Television, OnTheRedCarpet.com's parent company: