The wordless running joke between Brad Pitt and Ryan Reynolds: “All he wants is a cup of coffee”
The biggest stars in Hollywood often tend to make friends with some of the other biggest stars in Hollywood, which set the stage for Ryan Reynolds and Brad Pitt to ignite a running gag that’s spanned multiple movies and featured exactly zero lines of spoken dialogue.
Reynolds is no stranger to drafting in his celebrity pals for gratuitous cameo appearances, whether it’s Matt Damon being buried under prosthetics to play a redneck in Deadpool 2 or drafting Hugh Jackman, Dwayne Johnson, and John Krasinski for uncredited voice roles in Free Guy.
It was director David Leitch who served as the middle man, with the filmmaker having spent years working as Pitt’s stunt double on a number of productions before stepping behind the camera to make his feature-length debut co-helming John Wick alongside Chad Stahelski.
From there, Leitch moved on to Charlize Theron’s Atomic Blonde and then Reynolds’ aforementioned superhero sequel, where the ongoing gag was first deployed. One of the major set pieces in Deadpool 2 involves the entire X-Force team being gruesomely killed before they could even start their first mission, and a member of the superhero squad is an invisible character named Vanisher.
Reynolds thought it would be hilarious if one of the most famous faces on the planet popped up for less than a second of screen time, and Pitt was completely sold. Instead of taking his usual multi-million dollar salary for a day’s work, the Academy Award-winning actor and producer only requested that the star and producer hand-deliver him a cup of coffee.
“I was told all he wants is a cup of coffee,” Reynolds revealed, per Entertainment Tonight. “And I said, ‘Like a franchise or just one individual cup of coffee?’ And I was told one individual cup of coffee, which was really his way of saying, ‘I’m doing it for nothing’. And it was a total solid and the nicest thing anyone could do.”
It was far from being a one-time thing, though, with Reynolds repaying the favour. When Leitch directed the Pitt-led action comedy Bullet Train, a guest star was needed for a single shot that introduced the near-mythical assassin, Carver. Putting the shoe on the other foot, the gin magnate and Wrexham co-owner appeared for a solitary scene where he didn’t say a word.
That still wasn’t the end of it, after the joke took on its most metatextual form yet when Reynolds played the lead role in Krasinki’s family-friendly adventure, IF. One of the imaginary creatures, much like Vanisher, is completely invisible, isn’t seen onscreen, and doesn’t get any dialogue.
Even though Pitt had absolutely nothing to do with the film, didn’t go near the set or enter the recording booth, he was still listed in the credits as the ‘voice’ of Keith to continue the A-list pairing’s habit of entertaining themselves by cropping up in each other’s movies without uttering a word.
