Ryan Reynolds very sorry he had to kill his "darling" Rob McElhenney's Deadpool cameo

Things are going pretty well for Ryan Reynolds at the moment: He and wife Blake Lively were trading top box office status for a minute this summer, with Reynolds’ own Deadpool & Wolverine currently expected to win the box office this weekend despite being in its fifth weekend of release. (Admittedly, that has more to do with The Crow absolutely shitting the nest, but, still: Impressive!) But even a man on top of the world has regrets, serious, sad regrets, like making his good friend, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and Welcome To Wrexham co-creator Rob McElhenney, fly to London to film a cameo for the Deadpool… and then cutting the scene from the movie.

Reynolds addressed the deletion in a post on Instagram this weekend, invoking the old “Kill your darlings” adage to explain why he axed the scene, in which McElhenney played a member of the Time Variance Authority who apparently gets eaten by Extremely Boring CGI Smoke Monster Alioth near the end of the movie. (Nobody likes Alioth, right? It’s not just us?) Writing his post, Reynolds notes that “The sequence wasn’t working the way we’d originally constructed it. Rob was the only reason it stayed in the cut for as long as it did, because even under a TVA mask and helmet, you can feel him smoldering with a raw and almost infinite reservoir of talent, writerly wit and ‘I create hit tv shows’ swagger.” (It is ironic to us, we note in passing, that Reynolds can talk in any way about the difficulties of editing.) Anyway, Reynolds expresses his hope that the scene in question will “live on in the digital extras.” We assume it will also come up in Welcome To Wrexham, which was renewed for a fourth season by FX back in May; for his part, McElhenney showed he felt no hard feelings about the cut, responding to Reynolds’ heartfelt, very verbose praise of him as a friend and person with a far more succinct “How am I supposed to go back to writing dick jokes today?” in the replies.