Everybody knows you never go full Cajun…
After years of trying to bring the character to life in a Fox-produced solo film, Channing Tatum finally brought Gambit to live-action in 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine. Tatum‘s Gambit stole the show as audiences fell in love with the actor’s long-awaited debut as the Cajun, even if his accent made it all but impossible to understand him at times. It didn’t take long for fans to begin to call for more of Tatum‘s mumbly mutie. And with a little post-credit magic here and a deleted scene there, more of Tatum as Gambit in the MCU seemed to possibly be in the cards and then, Marvel Studios announced the main cast of Avengers: Doomsday, which included Tatum, allowing him to bring Le Diable Blanc to another party. This time, however, there will be one notable difference.
“I’m not gonna go full Cajun,” said Tatum of his role as the Ragin’ Cajun in next year’s Avengers: Doomsday.
Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for this? Woo, I’m about to make a name for myself here.
As Tatum explained in an interview with Variety, directors Anthony and Joe Russo “want things to be funny, but they don’t want to go full ‘Deadpool’,” in which the character’s accent more closely resembled the indecipherable gibberish spit out by Blake Clark‘s Farmer Fran in Adam Sandler‘s The Waterboy. “They want to keep the drama and keep it tight. When Gambit gets serious — when he drops the Mardi Gras mask — things do matter,” teasing a major role for Gambit, including a “big fight” with Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom that Tatum found himself sidelined for, thanks to an unidentified leg injury.
The change in approach comes in response to Marvel execs, who the star said “really had to wrap their mind around the accent and how people are going to understand him,” in the biggest Marvel film of the decade.
“There was very little improv. The Cajun dialect is a very particular one,” said Tatum in a previous interview of his first go around as the character. “I grew up in Mississippi and my dad is from New Orleans. So it’s one of those things that I grew up around it, but I’ve never done it. There are certain little isms that are very Cajun-y, but we actually intended it to be somewhat unintelligible. That was sort of the joke. [Co-star Ryan Reynolds would] come up to be and say, ‘I don’t want to know anything that you’re saying on this [take],’ so I just dialed it all the way up,” added Tatum. “And then other ones he’s like, ‘All right, I’ve got to understand what you’re saying now.’”
Whether the changes to the character result in this Gambit being a Variant from another timeline or just someone looking to communicate more clearly with his friends, fans will certainly be thrilled with the return of Tatum in the role.
Source: Access Hollywood, Variety
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