‘All the Light We Cannot See’ Director Shawn Levy on Those Taylor Swift-‘Deadpool 3’ Rumors (Exclusive)

With the level of secrecy in the MCU, Deadpool 3 writer-director Shawn Levy knows that there’s plenty of speculation about the casting for his upcoming Marvel film.

That gossip went into overdrive recently when Levy was spotted on multiple occasions spending time with Taylor Swift. It’s not terribly surprising, given that Swift is good friends with Levy’s friend and frequent collaborator, Ryan Reynolds, as well as Reynolds’ wife, Blake Lively. However, it did add some fuel to a long-simmering theory that Swift could be joining the MCU as Dazzler.

Swifties and Marvel fans alike have been abuzz about the possibility for some time, and it would make a fair amount of sense. Dazzler, who briefly appeared in 2019’s Dark Phoenix, played by Halston Sage, is a mutant most commonly associated with the X-Men in the comic canon. The glamorous character can control and manipulate sonic vibrations and radiate beams of light, and, as a side gig, is often portrayed as a singer or pop star.

Levy isn’t speaking to any Deadpool 3 rumors, however — not those about Swift, or Jennifer Garner, or Channing Tatum, or Halle Berry….

“That was just a Sunday night hang with some friends that became a lot more,” he told ET’s Ash Crossan of his Swift sighting. “I’ll just say that the proliferation of Deadpool 3 casting rumors is hilarious, and also really useful because now there’s no way for people to tell what’s real and what’s not. So I can just sit back and just let the wave of accuracy and falsehood wash over me.”

However, the director was more than happy to talk about the casting of his new Netflix limited series, All the Light We Cannot See. Based on Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, the World War II-era drama centers on Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind French teen. For the part, Levy was adamant that they cast an actress that was actually blind or low-vision, and ultimately they found Aria Mia Loberti.

Loberti is legally blind due to a severe form of the genetic condition achromatopsia, however, she had never acted or auditioned for anything before. In fact, she was in the midst of her doctoral studies in ancient rhetoric at Penn State University when she filmed her audition tape.

“Aria really was like finding a unicorn in the woods,” Levy recalled. “I saw over a thousand women and girls for the role of Marie, but what came through in Aria’s audition — which she filmed on her own laptop from her dorm room where she’s getting her PhD at Penn State — was her intelligence, her luminous physical quality.”

“That this face of hers has an innocence but it also has a real strength,” he added, “and I knew that even though she had no idea what acting was, had never acted, had never auditioned, I knew that if you give me someone who’s hungry and smart and strong and wants to be great, I can work with that. That’s a great place to start.”

Levy said there were questions from Netflix about casting an unknown in such a large production, however, he said he got no major pushback from the streaming service.

“I just suddenly had this epiphany in pre-production that I needed to cast someone who had the lived experience of the character,” he recounted. “That was a big swing, but to their credit, Netflix said, ‘Well, why you doing it? Explain it. We want to hear it from you.’ And I said not just ’cause it’s the right thing to do, it’s ’cause it’s the better thing to do because it’s gonna give this show some authenticity that it wouldn’t otherwise have.”

“I think it also helped that I then went and got Mark Ruffalo and Hugh Laurie, so there’s a few other faces to put on the poster,” he added with a laugh.

Comparing the cast to another one of his projects, Stranger Things, which cast veteran stars like Winona Ryder and David Harbour in the adult roles, while introducing a cast of mostly unknown young actors, Levy said he enjoys combining performers with varied levels of experience.

“You just get kind of an energy and you don’t quite know how it’s gonna go down,” he shared. “There were always moments that I couldn’t plan for, that might not have been in the script, but it keeps the process from the kind of predictable shoebox of what you think a scene is gonna be. It busts out of that into surprises that become the gold.”

Some of the four-part series was shot in Budapest, Hungary, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and Levy also made the decision to cast some Ukrainian refugees to play background actors in a scene where Marie and her father flee Paris on foot following the Nazi invasion.

“The timeliness of this story, the applicability of its themes is unsettling, but it’s what makes it important,” he shared of the series. “It’s shining a light on these themes of, how do we hold on to our better selves in dark times, and how do we hold onto humanity in the midst of inhumane behavior by your fellow humans? We’re living that, we’re seeing that. It is troubling, but it’s also really relevant, and I think it’s important to shine that light on these themes.”

All the Light We Cannot See premieres Nov. 2 on Netflix.

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