Deadpool 2 director David Leitch revealed that he provided facial capture for the computer-generated Juggernaut in the film. This news comes from a featurette on the upcoming home release, "Deadpool's Lips Are Sealed: Secrets And Easter Eggs."

Juggernaut appears in Deadpool 2 as a secondary villain who leads young Russell Collins (who will grow up to be the mutant hero Firefist) toward a life of crime and mayhem. The closing credits only say that the oversized character was played by "Himself." But fans learned later that star Ryan Reynolds provided the baddie's digitally deepened voice. Many assumed that a stunt performer did the motion and facial capture, but it turns out the truth is actually even weirder.

The new, digital version of Juggernaut is more true to the comics than the last time fans saw him in live-action. In X-Men: The Last Stand, actor Vinnie Jones put on the helmet - and a muscle suit - to play the role. In the source material, the character is superhumanly large, so a CG character was the smarter way to go. "Juggernaut really does take a village," Reynolds says in the featurette. "Dave, I think, is the face. I did the body, like the motion capture, and I do the voice." "So it just became efficient for time that instead of keeping a mo-cap actor around, I would just do the facial capture," Leitch adds.


Despite the first Deadpool's surprising success at the box office, the creators of the sequel didn't quite have a blank check for their film. Deadpool 2 did have almost twice the budget with $110 million versus the original's $58 million. But that's still way less than what studios like Marvel put into their big-event superhero movies. Even the relatively modest Ant-Man and the Wasp boasted a budget of at least $160 million. Deadpool 2 already had a fully CG character to contend with in X-Men's Colossus, so the production had to cut costs where it could. The audio commentary on the film revealed that instead of hiring a new actor to play the role of the rogue, indestructible mutant, the production cut costs by having Reynolds and Leitch put on the dots.

The fact that the Juggernaut character is played by the film's star and director is just another of Deadpool 2's clever casting Easter eggs. The most notable one upon the film's release was X-Force's Vanisher, who is invisible for most of his appearance until unexpected high winds blow his parachute into some power lines on the team's first mission. People who didn't blink in the brief shot in which he became visible noticed that he was played by Brad Pitt. Deadpool 2 also includes brief appearances from a variety of X-Men villains in the mutant superprison sequence, most of which weren't quite visible in the original release. But the extended, Super Duper Cut may show off even more clever nods that fans missed in the theater.