If this football thing doesn’t work out ...
Shepley played not one, but two roles in Deadpool 2
FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — Aspiring New York Jets offensive guard Dakoda Shepley has two non-speaking roles in the big-screen Marvel superhero movie Deadpool 2.
Shepley played Omega Red, a briefly shown nemesis of Wolverine, as well as a background extra early in the film.
The 23-year-old’s unlikely acting roles came about a year ago last May, after he’d finished his fourth of five years at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver — which, like Toronto, is a heavily worked “Hollywood North” hub.
“There were some guys on my UBC teams who were working as extras for their summer jobs,” the 23-year-old native of Windsor, Ont., said.
“They signed up on some extras website, where they just filled in their information. If they fit the criteria for the movie or the show, or whatever it was, they’d get called and be an extra. So I signed up for that, too.
“I ended up getting a body-double role in a Netflix film called Game Over, Man! which was super fun.”
Did he spot himself in that movie?
“Yeah. For, like, three seconds. I was a dead body, which is kind of funny. I got paid a thousand bucks to lay on my face, which is hilarious. That was the joke for the four days I was there. ‘So you’re just getting paid to lay down?’ Yup. My mom couldn’t believe it.
“So I did that, and then I fit the criteria for being in Deadpool 2. I went in to get costume-fitted, and face-checked — they took a photo of me in the costume to remember what I looked like.”
The next day, Shepley got a call.
“It was from the director of casting for the whole movie: ‘Here I am, sitting in a production meeting, and we’re looking at your photo. We like your look. We want to put you into a bigger role. We need to fly you to L.A. to get a mould made of your face so the artist can make these prosthetic pieces on your face.’ I was like, ‘Send me to L.A.! Let’s go!’ I was in L.A. for only 45 minutes.”
Originally, filmmakers wanted Shepley on the Vancouver set for 22 days, spread out through last summer.
“I said, ‘Listen, some of these days cut into my training camp for football at UBC.’ They said, ‘OK, we need to work around your schedule because you’re the actor.’ Which was sweet … We kind of went back and forth, and I wound up working just one of the last days of the shoot. Rumour has it, I would have had a bigger role, but it ended up not working out.”
Deadpool 2, starring Canadian Ryan Reynolds and Josh Brolin, hit theatres on May 18 and is still showing across Canada.
“I saw myself in it, and all my friends did. There’s actually a shot of me done on the last day, near the beginning of the film, where they didn’t even put me in makeup. It’s in the first quarter of the film. When I was watching I was like, ‘Did I just see myself with no makeup?’ Yeah, I’m actually in the movie a couple of times.”
Neither role had any speaking lines. Might acting be an actual career option for the former UBC arts major, should the NFL and, alternatively, the CFL not work out?
“Yeah, I guess I do have a couple of fallbacks. Kind of cool,” Shepley said.