Everyone loves 22 Jump Street star Channing Tatum, but what does Channing Tatum love? It turns out the answer is Gambit, the seductive, card-playing mutant thief who won over comic book fans as soon as he premiered in the pages of Uncanny X-Men in 1990. Tatum refers to Gambit as “the only X-Man I ever loved” in a recent interview with MTV (via Coming Soon), and admitted that he’s already met with X-Men franchise producer Lauren Schuler-Donner about playing him in a motion picture that, if Lauren Schuler-Donner has her way, would probably be centered entirely around Gambit.
“I met with Lauren Schuler-Donner, and I would love [it],” Channing Tatum said behind the scenes of the MTV Movie Awards. “Gambit is really the only X-Man that I’ve ever loved. I mean I’ve loved them all, they’re all great, but I guess from being down south – my dad’s from Alabama, I’m from Mississippi, Alabama and Florida – I don’t know, I just related to him. He’s just kind of a suave… He’s the most un-X-Man X-Man that’s ever been in X-Men. Other than maybe Wolverine, who’s kind of the anti-hero. He’s a thief. He’s not even a hero. He’s kind of walking the line of grey.”
“He loves women and drinking and smoking and stuff, so he’s just a cool guy that happens to have a good moral center, and so on,” Tatum added. But he was quick to point out that the project isn’t a sure thing yet. Still, he concluded, “I would die to play it. I’m already working on the accent. It’s crappy at the moment.”
If the deal comes through, Channing Tatum be the second actor to play Gambit in a live-action movie, following Taylor Kitsch, who briefly appeared as the mutant Remy LeBeaux in the 2009 movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Not that it matters. The X-Men movie franchise has a history of ignoring X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the characters it introduced. Gavin Hood’s film cast Tahyna Tozzi as a teenaged Emma Frost in the mid-1970s, a fact the following film in the franchise, X-Men: First Class, ignored just two years later by casting January Jones as an adult version of the character in the 1960s.
Besides, with all the time travel going on in this summers X-Men: Days of Future Past, there’s plenty of potential for the X-Men movies to reboot their continuity entirely without needing to completely go back to square one. We’ll find out if they decide to go that root in the next X-Men film hits theaters on May 23, 2014.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
