Leslie Uggams says Ryan Reynolds made her ‘feel safe’ as his badass sidekick in ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’: ‘He’s funny as hell’

nypost.com:

Ryan Reynolds is uniting screen superpowers with Hugh Jackman in “Deadpool & Wolverine,” the Marvel crossover blockbuster that hits theaters on Friday.But for the third film in the franchise’s trilogy, the madcap mutant has another partner in foul-mouthed wisecracking: Blind Al, Deadpool’s deadpanning roommate played by “Roots” legend Leslie Uggams — in all her 81-year-old badassness.Seventy-two years after she made her Apollo Theater debut as 9-year-old “Little Leslie Uggams” in 1952, the Harlem native is having a “movie queen” moment: Hot on the heels of co-starring in the Oscar-winning “American Fiction,” she’s back trading barbs with Reynolds’ Merc with a Mouth. “I love Ryan,” Uggams told The Post about her MCU roomie. “I love working with him.

He’s just wonderful, and we have great chemistry together when we’re on the screen.”Those screen sparks flew when Uggams was cast as Blind Al (short for Althea) in 2016’s “Deadpool,” the first installment in the series, which set a record for the highest-grossing R-rated movie at the time.

And she kept the quips coming in 2018’s “Deadpool 2,” another box-office smash.“Who knew this was gonna take off like this?” Uggams marveled. “And it’s been so much fun.

It’s a wild and crazy character, and I love her.”Due to the top-secret security surrounding any Marvel movie, the Tony-winning actress — who began her career long before there was such a thing as NDAs — had no idea exactly what universe she was getting herself into at first.“With a lot of these projects that you can’t talk about, scripts are encrypted and everything, so I had no idea of anything about the Deadpool character until I auditioned for it,” said Uggams. “That’s how secretive it was.