Behind The Scenes Of 'Deadpool': See How Five Different Actors Brought Colossus To Life

It's no secret that Deadpool is all the rage right now, and a sequel is already in development at 20th Century Fox. With a visual effects wizard like Tim Miller behind the camera as director for the first time, it's no surprise to see how visual effects were utilized perfectly to help bring Deadpool to life, making his masked face express a variety of emotions like the character does in the comic. But even more interesting is how five different actors and a team of special effects artists were used to bring the metal mutant Colossus to life in a completely different way than we'd seen on the big screen before. Find out how it was done after the jump.

Here's a Deadpool visual effects featurette looking at the creation of Colossus from Wired:

FX Guide dives even deeper into the process, giving us a breakdown of how five different actors helped bring the shiny, muscular X-Men team member to the big screen. First, the actor on set for production as Colossus was Andrei Tricoteux, a 6-foot, 9-inch actor who sometimes wore a gray tracking suit to help those who would replace him with a finished Colossus in post-production. Even though the actor is a huge guy, sometimes he still had to wear big platform shoes to make him even taller. Here's a before and after image of Tricoteux on the set of Deadpool:

But since Tricoteux couldn't always go through the swift motions needed for certain action sequences on set, that's where actor T.J. Storm comes into play, doing motion-capture performing for body motion. That takes care of Colossus' movement, but he has a face too. And since neither Tricoteux or Storm had the look they wanted for Colossus, it was stunt performer Glenn Ennis who serves as the inspiration for the chiseled jaw line that makes Colossus look so intimidating. His face was still modified in post-production to get the exact shape right though.

Even with those three actors, they didn't have everything they needed, because Colossus still has to talk. The voice was provided by Serbian actor Stefan Kapi?i?, finally giving us a big screen version of the character true to his comic book roots. And finally, to make sure the facial performance matched up properly with the voicework, Digital Domain team member and motion capture supervisor Greg LaSelle did the multi-camera facial performance with phosphorescent paint sprayed on his face, syncing his performance to the lines that were already recorded.

Personally, I think this mash-up of a variety of performances sometimes made the Colossus performance a little awkward, but not enough to really tain him as a character and take you out of the movie. Even at those times, some incredible work was done to bring the character to life in the way that fans have wanted for awhile.

FX Guide has a much more detailed dive into the visual effects, including much more than just the work that went into bringing Colossus to life. So head over to that full article to find out a bunch more behind the scenes information about Deadpool.