If fans were wondering why actor TJ Miller won’t be appearing in Deadpool & Wolverine, the star may have just answered their question. Miller appeared in the first two Deadpool films alongside star Ryan Reynolds, and now he’s getting very candid about his feelings regarding how the fame of playing the “Merc With a Mouth” changed him. In fact, he seems to suggest that Reynolds was a virtual nobody before the film’s success.

While appearing on the podcast Help! with Natalie Cuomo, via Yahoo Entertainment, Miller claims that Reynolds changed significantly following the success of the first Deadpool film. The actor said, “And then so Deadpool 2 he was a different person. That’s just a different guy. A guy that’s become famous, in a movie that is that funny, it changes people. And I don’t think it really changed me.”

The most pointed opinion about Reynolds has sparked some criticism online, in defense of the Deadpool actor, where Miller makes the comment that Reynolds had no real success before Deadpool and that it was the film that made him.

“People get really famous and then things get really weird. That’s what happened from Deadpool 1 to Deadpool 2. You first had Ryan Reynolds who wasn’t like, um, everybody knew who he was but he had never had, like, he had a lot of movies that were failures or just didn’t do that well. So Deadpool was a real long shot for him and it took him 10 years to get that movie made and the he did it, and it was the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time or something.”

Ryan Reynolds Had Box Office Hits Before Deadpool

While some of the films Reynolds has been in weren’t critical darlings before Deadpool, he still starred in more than a few that were financial successes at the box office. In 2005, he starred in The Amityville Horror remake, which grossed $107.5 million worldwide on a $19 million budget. In 2009, he started his tenure as Wade Wilson in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which pulled in $373.1 million globally on a $150 million budget. Also in 2009, he teamed up with Sandra Bullock in the romantic comedy The Proposal, a film that grossed over $317 million globally on a $40 million budget. Finally, in 2012, he starred alongside Denzel Washington in Safe House, a film that grossed $208.1 million worldwide on an $85 million budget. All of these hits happened before Deadpool was released in 2016 and, if we’re getting technical, some of his other films, like Smokin’ Aces and Just Friends, were modest hits that gained cult followings. Needless to say, Reynolds wasn’t starving for hits.

This isn’t the first time that Miller has commented negatively about Reynolds. During an appearance on The Adam Carolla Show, the actor stated that Reynolds was “horrifically mean” to him on the set of Deadpool and that he insulted him in character as a way to personally tear Miller down.

“As the character, he was, like, horrifically mean to me. But to me. As if I’m Weasel. He was like, ‘You know what’s great about you, Weasel? You’re not the star, but you do just enough exposition that it’s funny, and then we can leave and get back to the real movie.”

After that interview, things seemed to calm down after Miller alleged that Reynolds personally emailed him to sort out their differences and suggested that everything was back to normal between the two of them. Given the nature of this recent interview, things might not be as harmonious as we were led to believe.

Aside from appearing in the first two Deadpool movies, Miller has appeared in Office Christmas Party, Big Hero 6, Ready Player One, Cloverfield, She’s Out of My League, and the comedy series Silicon Valley. Since appearing in Deadpool 2, Miller has been at the center of his own controversies. In 2017, the actor was accused of sexual assault by a woman he attended college with, which emerged as a part of the #MeToo movement in Hollywood. For his part, Miller called his accuser a vindictive former classmate and denied her accusations. The actor was also arrested in 2018 after making a bomb threat aboard a New York Amtrak train. There turned out to be no explosive device present and the charges were ultimately dismissed in 2021. Since these legal woes, Miller hasn’t lined up any major acting credits.