In this week's Empire Podcast, Ryan Reynolds dropped in to talk about his latest, The Croods, as well as the proposed Justice League movie and - at our insistence - the fabled hard-R script for a Deadpool spin-off currently kicking around his production office.

You can hear it from the horse's mouth below - Ryan's interview starts at 48.50 or so - but we've also put snippets of what he said below for your reading pleasure. For the extended Ryan Reynolds interview, featuring much more than what you hear in the podcast, be sure to click in this direction, because it really is very funny.

To start with, Mr. Reynolds reminds us of what we already knew: there's a Deadpool script, and it's very much a hard-R, and it's from the guys who wrote Zombieland, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick.

"I love Deadpool and there is a script that’s in development. But it’s so, so far into the R-rated zone… it’s a nearly NC-17 world and I just don’t know if the studio would ever risk their reputation doing it. We’ve been developing it and we would never wanna do it unless you could it that R-rated way, so…" 

"[The Deadpool script has] got a similar tone [to Zombieland], almost. They wrote it and they developed it as well and, you know, it’s sitting there. You could do it for a pittance compared to the modern sort of epic scale superhero movies, but it’s about a guy who knows he’s in a movie and knows he’s in a comic book who is deeply mentally disturbed and hyper violent. And that’s tough to get by a studio."

But how would it fit within the Deadpool story that we know from X-Men Origins: Wolverine?

"I don’t think you can do that, because that character would really sully that whole world. The script is one rewrite away from Deadpool jumping across the desk at the studio executive and attacking him."

"But I’ve always wanted to do the movie just if only because Deadpool would get to do his own movie trailer. So that’s a thing that we were dying to do and we would love to be a part of that. I don’t know how it would fit though, no. In the current iteration of the script, it doesn’t address Wolverine – though it does address Deadpool’s appearance in Wolverine. Deadpool was not happy with Deadpool in Wolverine. He has a sort of a WTF!? moment with that." 

Hearing Reynolds talk about the Deadpool project is a difficult thing to deal with: it sounds so good, yet so unfeasible, it's almost like torture for fans of Marvel's beloved fourth wall-breaking Merc With The Mouth. But the idea of a self-aware Deadpool trailer, as Reynolds points out, is a very exciting one, as is the concept of Deadpool being conscious of his mishandling in the Wolverine spin-off.

And as for that "What about Kick-Ass? That was funny and hyper violent and a comic-book property..." comment that's percolating in your noggin, remember that Kick-Ass was director Matthew Vaughn's baby, and he saw it through to completion before it was released in the UK by Universal and the US by Lionsgate. That said, if Kick-Ass 2 is a huge smash, perhaps that might make Fox think again about Deadpool.

In other words, file this one under "very exciting but very unlikely" and hope that somehow Reynolds, Reese, Wernick and co. persuade Fox - as they own the X-Men movie rights, and Deadpool is part of that - to think again and that they can somehow fish out the cash from somewhere. A kickstarter campaign, perhaps?

The Croods is out now, as is this week's Empire Podcast. Download it now, or if you'd rather, subscribe via our iTunes page or this handy RSS feed.