Ed Skrein talks Ajax; feels Deadpool is first “post-modern” superhero film

By some bizarre twist of fate, not only are we getting the DEADPOOL film that Ryan Reynolds had campaigned long and hard for, but it will be the off-the-wall, R-rated, fourth-wall breaking film that we never dreamed possible; now it's just a matter of finding out if the finished product can live up to all of the hype. Ed Skrein, who plays Ajax in DEADPOOL, spoke with Digital Spy about taking over the lead role in the rebooted TRANSPORTER franchise, but the conversation soon switched tracks to DEADPOOL and Skrein revealed how much of Ajax's origin we can expect to see in the film:

No, we don't go too deep into Ajax's backstory. We mention it, it's very faithful to the first section of Ajax in the comics, the backstory that we see, the flashbacks in the comics, and so we're very faithful to that. There's a second half of Ajax in the comics, where he comes back five years later with this big crazy suit and stuff, and we didn't touch on that, so this is the early Ajax. We've stayed very faithful to that.

Although Skrein feels blessed by all the superhero movies we've been receiving these past few years, he worries that there are so many of them at this point that they're starting to lose that original thrill we all had of opening up a comic book and seeing something crazy unfold. Ed Skrein hopes that DEADPOOL will bring some of that craziness back into superhero films.

It's a lot edgier than the stuff that you'll normally see. That was a priority for us from the beginning. We'd been so blessed and we're so lucky to have had all these superhero movies so far, but we possibly have become saturated by them so they're possible coming formulaic. Also, they're maybe not quite as faithful to the actual feeling that we had when we were 13 years old and reading comic books, like 'I can't believe he just chopped someone's head off and said something like that, and then stabbed someone in the eye, and then ran off and did all this crazy stuff! In the movies they do some cool upper-cuts or some cool stuff, but it's not representing the characters right, especially someone like Deadpool, who's so irreverent and so violent. They don't get represented like that most of the time, but we've done that. We've really done that, it was a priority for us from the beginning to do that, and it really feels like we've created the first post-modern Hollywood superhero movie.

It remains to be seen whether DEADPOOL will be the success we all hope it will be, but should it take off it's Skrein's hope that it will lead to studio's taking on crazier superheroes who were onced deemed unmarketable. DEADPOOL will throw down with Ajax on February 12, 2016 but before that, Ed Skrein will be stepping into Jason Statham's old role of Frank Martin in THE TRANSPORTER: REFUELED which opens on September 4, 2015.