PHOTO CREDIT: 20th Century Fox
Ryan Reynolds is a non-player character in a fictional video game in Shawn Levi’s Free Guy. The video game, called Free City, is a blend of GTA and Fortnite in which human players share the world.
Ryan’s character, called Guy, is a bank teller. Whose job is just to lie down and converse with his buddy when players arrive to rob the bank.
The movie’s plot kicks in when Guy gains consciousness and becomes aware of his NPC status. What he gets is an existential crisis of the strangest kind.
For Reynolds, best known for playing Deadpool, the character is a nice palate cleanser. He said in a press conference about the movie, “There’s a movie that I love called Being There starring Peter Sellers.
I had the first foothold into this character and this world. And there’s something really wonderful about playing a character who’s kind of naive and innocent. And in the movie, he’s in a sense a four-year-old adult.”
He added, “It was really fun exploring everything with new eyes, which is what this character gets to do, and sort of filtering that through the prism of comedy and occasional cynicism.
The official synopsis of Free Guy reads, “Ryan Reynolds stars as a bank teller who discovers he is actually a background player in an open-world video game. And decides to become the hero of his own story—one he rewrites himself. Now in a world where there are no limits, he is determined to be the guy who saves his world his way, before it is too late.”