Deadpool 2: The Secret Taylor Swift Easter Egg You Likely Missed
In case you've been living under a rock lately, you've probably noticed that Taylor Swift is everywhere. Her massive, record-breaking Eras Tour, which expanded its reach to South America and Europe as well as added more tour dates in North America through the end of 2024, is still underway and making headlines. She's set to write and direct a feature film. In her mission to re-record albums after losing her master recordings to an underhanded sale, she's releasing old music and making it new again, like "Speak Now (Taylor's Version)," which dropped in the midst of the Eras Tour's US leg in July 2023. What you might not realize, in the midst of the Swift-mania sweeping the world, is that she's also part of "Deadpool 2," kind of.
Relatively early into the movie, Ryan Reynolds' Wade Wilson, the scarred masked vigilante known as Deadpool, finds himself at the X-Mansion after tragically losing his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). While there, Wade is unmasked and borrows some clothes — some very specific clothes, in fact. Underneath his cardigan, Wade sports a tee featuring two cats sitting next to one another in a pink circle; surrounding the circle, the text reads, "Olivia & Meredith: Best Friends Purrrr-ever." The cats in question, Olivia Benson and Meredith Grey, belong to none other than Grammy winner and megastar Taylor Alison Swift.
Taylor's cats are in Deadpool 2 because she's friends with Ryan Reynolds
To the uninformed, this could seem like an incredibly random reference. Why in the world would two cats belonging to a musical superstar be in a superhero movie? Well, Taylor Swift happens to be very good friends with both Ryan Reynolds and his wife, actress Blake Lively, making the shirt a nice little nod to one of the couple's closest friends.
Lively has been spotted at the Eras Tour during its run — Swift was even seen holding hands with one of Lively and Reynolds' daughters after a show in Philadelphia — and during that same run of shows, she specifically said to the crowd that she loves their daughters James, Betty, and Inez "more than anything." In a Tweet featuring a few Instagram stories from Swift that prominently show off her cats — named for "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit's" Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and "Grey's Anatomy's" Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) — the songstress makes sure to tell her pets the excellent news. After a posting picture of Wade wearing the shirt with the caption "I'm so proud of my fuzzy daughters," Swift records herself petting both cats and letting them know that they're both in a huge superhero flick. The cats, for their part, seem relatively unimpressed beyond some purring — especially Olivia, whom Swift describes in a caption as "very private."
Ryan Reynolds and his wife, Blake Lively, are also part of Taylor Swift's musical career
Reynolds and Lively are, in turn, close friends with Swift, and have worked both directly and indirectly with her throughout her musical career. Lively made her directorial debut working on Swift's music video for "I Bet You Think About Me," a previously unreleased vault track that finally found its way onto "Red (Taylor's Version)," and James, Betty, and Inez all get name-dropped in songs on Swift's Grammy-winning 2020 album "folklore." Not just that, but on Swift's 2017 album "reputation," James, the oldest Reynolds daughter, utters the word "gorgeous" on a track by the same name before the song begins.
In late 2022, after Swift's tenth studio album "Midnights" came out, Reynolds told Jess Cagle during an interview on Sirius XM that he, Lively, and their girls love Taylor Swift as a person as well as her music. "In fact, I'm not making this up," Reynolds told Cagle." We are having a Taylor Swift Midnights dance party in, uh, right after this. It's Sunday. We're headed straight to the porch where we're doing a full dance number set to Midnights... swear words included. My favorite thing is when a three-year-old is just throwing down the f-bomb in a song."
Perhaps the funniest thing Reynolds said, though, is that his daughters thought her musical career was just some sort of side hustle. "I think what's most exciting for them is that for the longest time they just thought Taylor's just a, you know, like an aunt, like a friend of mommy and daddy that's very, very close, almost family," Reynolds said. "And then they went to a concert one day and were like, 'Oh, oh this isn't a hobby.'" No, kids. Taylor Swift's nearly twenty-year career, spanning basically every genre possible, is a little more than just a "hobby."