Ryan Reynolds, Benj Pasek & Justin Paul On Their ‘Spirited’ Shortlisted Song ‘Good Afternoon;’ They Dare Reynolds & Will Ferrell To Perform At Oscars

Apple TV+ is in the awards mix for the Ryan Reynolds-Will Ferrell musical Spirited, in particular for the big song and dance number Good Afternoon that has made the shortlist. This is a rip roaring full blown musical number, one that tests the stars ability to not only sing, but dance as well. Here, Reynolds, who suggested the song, discusses pulling it off with songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, best known for La La Land and for teaming with Hugh Jackman on The Greatest Showman. The same Jackman who is publicly campaigned against the tune for fear that Reynolds will be extra insufferable when they reprise their superhero characters Deadpool and Wolverine.

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DEADLINE: This is quite a musical number, and if you guys get the nomination, it may be the first time for a nominated song that has the lyric “ass-less chaps.”

RYAN REYNOLDS: That might be worthy of its 20/20 special. It’s a fun fact, but there’s also something nice about an airy bottom. You want to feel the horse under you. Also, they say the perineum is the third eye.

JUSTIN PAUL: Well, um, did you pronounce that correctly?  

REYNOLDS: Perineum. I’m not sure. I’m Canadian, so we say things funny.

DEADLINE: Kidding aside, what was the toughest thing, Ryan, for you and Will Ferrell to encroach on the song and dance arena owned by your pal Hugh Jackman?

REYNOLDS: Probably the gigantic barking voices in your head at night saying, you should never do a musical. What are you doing? You’ve never done this before. You’re outside of your lane. Stop! That was probably the biggest barrier to entry for me. I can’t speak for Will, but the thing is, the song Good Afternoon was…fun. I got to really hide behind a sort of a Dick Van Dyke era Cockney accent. Any time you are stepping into a device like that, it makes it weirdly easier because I can disassociate a little bit more. I felt a little bit more full-throated when I took the leap and sang those parts. But the tap dancing? I would say was the hardest part for both Will and I. When we started the movie, we categorically said we would not do tap. I don’t know who crumbled first, but someone did. And the next thing I know we were doing tap in in Good Afternoon. But I’m so thrilled we did it. It has been immortalized on film. I’m not sure I’ll ever have to do it again. We had an incredible teacher in Chloe Arnold.

DEADLINE: Benj and Justin, you worked with Hugh Jackman on The Greatest Showman. Ryan here will be working with him soon again. They are pseudo-feuding online all the time. Compare and contrast their musical abilities.

PASEK: There was a support group for this.

PAUL: Yeah. Compare and contrast. Oh, we could never do such a thing.

REYNOLDS: We could never do such a thing! But they do it with me all the time. They fall into my arms when they see him. Oh, thank God. It’s Hugh. Sobbing and crying. They just get weak.

PASEK: I do feel like maybe we got the opportunity to do this because Ryan and Hugh are so close, and, and we did have the wonderful experience of doing The Greatest Showman with Hugh. So maybe, maybe there was a little bit of musical bug he caught. You tell us, Ryan.

REYNOLDS: Yeah, every time I’ve seen Hugh perform in a musical, and I’ve seen that many times now, I  frankly find it very intimidating. He’s good at it. It’s in his bones. It feels like something he was born to do. And then when you flip that coin over, you realize that how unfair life is, because you see him play these roles that have no singing, dancing, like in The Son. And he’s just a maestro at that as well. He is at the point where he must be stopped. I don’t know who’s gonna do it but someone should.

DEADLINE: You say all those great things about him, all three of you, and yet he’s campaigning against the Oscar aspirations of the song Good Afternoon. Because he believes that Ryan will be otherwise insufferable when they work on Deadpool 3. What chance do I have of putting you over the top?

REYNOLDS: Well, Mike Fleming, Deadline’s pretty damn powerful platform. I’ve been an avid reader for, for many, many years post the Nikki Finke era.

DEADLINE: Also, as a guy who wondered how you could be that handsome and ripped all the time, and now you have proven you can sing and tap dance. I can’t be the only guy out there cursing my luck and wondering, what frigging genetic line did I get in, while you and Jackman were on a much better line?

REYNOLDS: You know, we all got our own little bag of rocks to carry, Mike.

PAUL: You know, we work closely with Hugh Jackman and have to deal with just that. [We’ve decided] it’s the way life deals the cards. Sometimes you just keep telling the dealer, hit me. Some of us bust.

DEADLINE: Benj and Justin, when you are writing songs for two actors who while capable and versatile, don’t call making musicals their day job, what’s key to writing good songs that will present them at their best? Especially while they are dancing?

PASEK: I mean, you gotta work around the shortcomings, you know, and… [laughs].

PAUL: He’s not kidding. But actually it’s such a gift when you’re getting to write and know who you’re writing for. And obviously, you know, the bonus is when it’s someone is as freakishly talented as Ryan. We have this built-in litmus test. We’ve seen and admired their work, we know what they do best. And the talents are pretty unlimited. But as we’re writing, we’re sort of able to, in our own heads, do our best sort of Ryan Reynolds or Will Ferrell, and that is the built in litmus test through the course of the writing.

PASEK: You write a line and you immediately can be like, wait, will, like, how will Ryan sound there. Some days that’s hard because Ryan can make anything funny. So you’re like, is the line funny, or something Ryan will probably make funny? It’s great, sort of hearing it in their voices. They have their own brand of humor that we sort of can lean into and it really helped guide us. When you’re starting with a blank page and it could become anything, any parameters are so helpful. And when the parameters are, we’re writing this big production number for these two guys, knowing their brand of humor, knowing that they can pull off the pace of it, the tempo, all of that, it is helpful. We’ll go, we have to write something funnier for Ryan, or for Will, rise to their level.

PAUL: Ryan was a collaborator in so many ways. The song idea for Good Afternoon was his. The line existed in the original Charles Dickens book. When Ebenezer Scrooge would slam the door on folks he didn’t like, he’d say, ‘Good afternoon.’ But the idea to make that into a phrase that could have been the sickest burn in the 1800s, was Ryan’s idea. In our initial zoom to pitch him on the project, he said, ‘Hey, could this be a big production number?’

REYNOLDS: For me, I don’t know that I ever would’ve had the courage to do a movie like this if these two weren’t involved. They were involved before I was, and to me that was the selling point.

DEADLINE: What made you jump in?

REYNOLDS: Getting older. And realizing you can’t be good at anything unless you’re willing to be bad at it initially. Embracing that weirdly frees you up. Aside from the obscene privilege of working with Justin and Benj, I’d always wanted to work with Will. I’d struggle to find another comedic actor who’s contributed more to the lexicon than Will Ferrell. And he’s genuine. Having a real partner in this crazy experiment we were doing…years ago, I had the great privilege of working with Denzel Washington, and he said, if you don’t trust the pilot, don’t get in the plane. It was great advice. I had multiple pilots here, including our director Sean Anders.

DEADLINE: The Joker sequel is being done as a musical. Is it inevitable that you and Jackman bring Deadpool and Wolverine into the tuner genre?

REYNOLDS: I don’t know. I would have trouble singing as I’m gargling his blood [laughs]. No, we’ll see.

DEADLINE: Tell us about that moment where you’re out there doing this difficult number, your feet are swollen, you got shin splints or whatever, your inner voice goes what the hell am I doing, and then you just crush it…

REYNOLDS: I know that exact moment, and it’s a perfect embodiment of what it is to shoot any film, really. It was during Good Afternoon, with Will and me. It’s an enormous dance number with pretty much every single dancer we had in the company. And massive, broad single camera takes where everything had to go right before you could move on. Will and I would have these takes where we had to tap dance and sing at the same time, and get these dance moves just right, in front of 100 real dancers who never failed and nailed it every time. But it was just take after take after take where something would go wrong. I would finally get my part perfect and Will would mess up or, Will would finally get his part just brilliantly. And I’d screw up on my side. I remember when we finally got the one. We didn’t even need to hear someone else tell us. We got the one, we knew, and when it happened I don’t know that I’ve ever felt like that. I could feel Will’s ribs cracking under my hug. We embraced each other with such fervor. I feel like we may have spiritually traded places. It was one of the best moments of the entire film for us.

Good Afternoon, for us at least, was the one that was most complicated, where you’re just beat, you’re soaked. We were in winter clothes, it’s the middle of July in Boston. I mean, you couldn’t find worse conditions to do something that requires your heart rate to stay at an even 140 the whole time.

DEADLINE: Benj and Justin, how was that moment for you, watching Fred and Ginger nail it?

PASEK: Oh, we loved it, and would love it if the possibility arose to have them…do it again. That’s what we’re looking forward to.

DEADLINE: Are you daring Ryan and Will to do it on live TV at the Oscars?  

PAUL: If we were so lucky…Ryan was saying the other day, what would it look like if the possibility arose to do this on the Oscar stage? And I don’t know. I think that would be pretty thrilling to not just get it one time in a film, but have to do it live. You know, what, what could that look?

DEADLINE: What could go wrong?

REYNOLDS: Would you like the answer alphabetically, or chronologically?

PASEK: The Greatest Showman came about because I know Hugh performed on the Oscars. Larry Mark was one of the producers, and they started thinking about the movie for the first time.

DEADLINE: This would be reverse engineering, in that if Ryan proves his song and dance bona fides on the Oscars, he can become the host. And serve as fodder for the cynical Live Blog I do on Deadline with Joe Utichi.

REYNOLDS: I can’t imagine hosting the Oscars, where the ultimate win for me would be breaking even. What do you have to gain there? That’s a tough job. I have such admiration for the folks to step up and do that. Hey and they always do it well.

DEADLINE: We hear that they pay like $15,000, less than the $500,000 Jarred Carmichael said he got for the Golden Globes…

REYNOLDS: He was worth every nickel of that.  

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