The man Ryan Reynolds plays in the new comedy Free Guy isn’t real. That’s true of all fictional characters, of course—but even within the imaginary premise of director Shawn Levy’s film, Reynolds is not really a person. Not existing is the whole point of the story.

His appropriately and generically named “Guy” is one of countless artificial intelligence programs in an open-world online game where “real” players log in to run wild, rob banks, crash cars, blow up everything in sight, and commit myriad other acts of anarchy and malfeasance in the name of amusement. Reynolds’s character is essentially a digital extra, designed to be walking, talking collateral damage.

Then one day, he wakes up. Guy becomes self-aware. Sentient. And he begins to wonder why he is compelled to do the same routine, faithfully following expectations while others around him defy the rules, take risks, and live ridiculously large. That’s when things get weird for those of us watching.

Every day, Guy wakes up, checks the headlines, picks out similar clothes, gets the same coffee, and dispassionately checks in to work. His routine is so familiar and so relatable, especially in the numbing age of endless lockdown, that we—real, actual people—might find ourselves wondering: Wait…am I a background character too?

“Yeah, are we in a simulation?” Reynolds asked in a joint interview with Levy.  It’s an idea he returned to later: “I know I’ve read those articles too!” He flared his fingers around his head and made an explosion sound: Mind = blown.

Would a simulation explain the phenomenon of collective false memories? Is this why we experience coincidences so bizarre that they feel more like program glitches? Like Guy himself, could a simulation explain why we struggle so hard to change our ways and live to the fullest? 

This question has long vexed sci-fi writers, and has increasingly been addressed in serious ways by scientists, filmmakers, and philosophers.

Now, it’s a popcorn movie’s turn to tackle the subject. 

While Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elon Musk spin their wheels on whether Simulation Theory could actually be real, Levy and Reynolds use the premise of Free Guy to highlight something undeniable: We do repeat endless patterns. We are averse to challenge and risk. We often become hopelessly trapped in ruts. But unlike digital avatars, there are no do-overs for us.

Free Guy is the video game movie that warns us we have no extra life.

Levy wasn’t sure he even wanted to do this movie at first. Reynolds, who is also a producer of Free Guy, sent him the spec script by Matt Lieberman (which later received a rewrite by Zak Penn,) knowing that Levy had a reputation for bringing heart to big-budget visual-effects bonanzas like the Night at the Museum films, Real Steel, and Stranger Things. Still, Levy wasn’t feeling it.

“It was a huge idea, the idea of a background character in a video game gaining consciousness, but I read it cursorily and thought, well, I’m not a hardcore gamer. This one’s not for me,” Levy said. That was the universe pushing back on the possibility. But Levy liked Reynolds and wanted to work with him on something, so he agreed to meet and discuss.

“We sat down and Ryan said, I know this is a big hooky concept, but let’s focus our energies on a parable,” Levy said. “Let’s use this video game, high-concept idea to do a movie about identity, about personal agency, about the possibility of impact on the world in which we find ourselves.” Gradually, he found himself won over.

In the movie, Jodie Comer plays a real woman who is searching the game for a valuable piece of code she helped create. Comedian Lil Rel Howery plays Guy’s best friend, another background character who is more than happy to stay where he is and urges his pal to do the same. “You have a character that exists in the real world in Jodie, and you have Guy in the video game. He’s made of zeros and ones and is a piece of code, and she’s a live human,” Levy says. But they both feel the same way about themselves. “You’re in a groove of repetition: What is the price and reward of stepping out of that?”

Harold Ramis and Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day was their inspiration: a lighthearted rom-com with a Twilight Zone premise that became a way to explore existential angst. “I’ve always thought of Free Guy as a bit of a Trojan horse, a video game premise for a movie that is as much a descendant of The Truman Show and Being There as it is a descendant of Ready Player One or any other video game movie,” Levy says. Those are intimidating comparisons, but the 86% positive score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes suggests the film has hit close to its mark.

Free Guy, with its literal nobody of a central character trapped in a nihilistic hellscape, stands as a metaphor for our own sense of meaninglessness in a world that feels increasingly distressful and beyond our control. 

“Those were incredibly resonant ideas in the summer of ’18 and ’19,” Levy recalls, thinking back to the origins of the project. “Obviously, the political landscape has shifted a bit since then.” Basically, they made the film, it was scheduled to debut in July 2020, and then the universe stomped on it, as it stepped on everyone and everything, in the form of a global pandemic and year-plus lockdown.  

These stressful, uncertain times have only magnified the notions at the heart of Free Guy. Our lives became even smaller and more repetitive, while the world outside became more distressing and painful. Everybody began running the same start-up program: (1) Wake up. (2) Check Twitter. (3) Grieve deeply. (4) Try to get out of bed.

Now what?

Free Guy arrives this week just as we’re tentatively emerging from this spiral. When we push back and break through, the film says, we cease to be mere background characters with no true say over our destiny. “This idea of, okay, well, you can be a passenger to life and the world as you find it, or you can consider the possibility of effecting it and defining your own trajectory in that world, those were ideas that Ryan and I connected on deeply,” Levy says.

“And then we smuggled it into this giant concept,” Reynolds adds. “No matter who you are, we all have, to varying degrees, our own little bags of rocks that we carry around with us that keep us staid and stuck.” The actor said that’s true of himself. “I find that I have to work to stretch,” he says. “Sometimes I have to say, Okay, am I willing to fail? Am I willing to suck at something in order to be good at something new? As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten better about that.”

Reynolds recalled being 18, living in Canada, and working in the shipping department of a grocery store, spending all his spare time and scant extra cash to fly to Los Angeles to audition for acting roles. “When I was younger, being typecast for something was a way-the-fuck uptown problem,” he says. “Like, Great! Typecast me in any way you want! I will be happy with that! I still hadn’t even quit my job driving a forklift in Vancouver, you know, and I remember thinking, I will play the kooky neighbor on a fifth-rate sitcom for the next 25 years if you let me.”

Then, after finding some success, Reynolds got scared. He got cautious and played things safe, which is when he felt his career stagnating. “I would pass on auditions for absolutely incredible filmmakers for fear of just sucking, you know? I would find some excuse as to why I can’t go in and put myself on the line,” he says. 

Which filmmakers? “I don’t want to say,” Reynolds replies. “That filmmaker might be like, ‘What? I wouldn’t have hired you anyway!’ It wasn’t really until my mid-30s that I got more comfortable with experimenting. That was the lesson that has been the building block for so many things that I love and get to do now, and am privileged to do.”

Levy went through a similar process and says he started to see fear as a good sign; it means you’re pushing yourself. “We both left our Canadian lives. I left at 16 to come to the U.S. There was a path that was much more comfortable and assured where we had been raised, Ryan in Vancouver, me in Montreal. But there was also this audacity, this terrifying prospect of stepping out of that comfort zone. That’s something we both went through.”

He hopes others will be able to relate to that feeling. “We all want to keep challenging ourselves and not repeat,” Levy adds. “And this is the reason that we had confidence that Free Guy’s themes would resonate. There’s nobody in any walk of life that doesn’t know it’s scary to change things up, whatever your job, whatever your family situation. It is a terrifying thing to think about divergence from that path.”

That’s the actual frightening prospect: Not that we might not truly exist, but that by our own actions we allow ourselves to become irrelevant background dwellers. Not everybody can be the main character—and sometimes, as on Twitter, that’s the last thing you want to be on any given day—but everyone yearns to step out of worn-out routines, or else they become wallpaper.

“It’s so easy to be complacent in the face of what is habit, right? It takes a bold, scary step to question the way you assume things work,” Levy says. “That applies to our political lives, our ecological lives. We have to question: Just because things are a certain way, does that mean that’s the way they have to be? These are fundamental questions we all wrestle with.”

“I love the bystander effect,” Reynolds adds. “It’s that idea that if the building is on fire, but nobody else is running, we all stay, wait, and die—until someone says, ‘Hold on, the building’s on fire! Let’s go!’”

Consider Free Guy that alarm-sounder, using spectacle and comedy to break you free of algorithms, expectations, and those oh-so-comfortable comfort zones. 

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