Of all the great character appearances we got in Deadpool & Wolverine, one that has received a great deal of attention is Channing Tatum’s Gambit. While all the other Marvel heroes we saw in the movie were versions of characters that had appeared in Fox’s Marvel projects before, Gambit was the one that never was, a character from a film that was only ever made in a parallel universe, and he had an accent that probably never should have been.
One of the running jokes of Deadpool & Wolverine is that Gambit is borderline incomprehensible, with a cajun accent so thick it’s hard for anybody to understand what he’s saying. Deadpool even asks in the film if his “dialect coach was a Minion.” In a recent video for Vanity Fair, Tatum’s director, and fiancée, Zoë Kravitz, asked the actor if he thinks that was a fair criticism, and Tatum said…
‘Fair’ is an interesting word in that question. No, I don’t think that’s fair.
To be fair, the Gambit accent was played intentionally for laughs. Channing Tatum also talked about how the accent was inspired by his father and people he knew in Louisiana, where he grew up, and in neighboring Mississippi. Even if the accent was supposed to be a joke, it sounds like it’s one the actor takes a bit personally.
If we had even seen Channing Tatum play Gambit in his own film during the decade-plus that he tried to get a Gambit movie made, we almost certainly would have gotten a different accent. Even if the movie had been more of a comedy than other Fox/Marvel efforts, making your main character almost impossible to understand just doesn’t work. And one has to wonder if Channing Tatum will have a chance to give us his “real” Gambit accent at some point.
The topic of a Gambit movie has come back in a big way since his appearance in Deadpool & Wolverine, and even Ryan Reynolds has advocated for it to finally happen. While there are reasons that a solo Gambit movie may not be the way to go, it seems possible, even likely, that we will see a live-action Gambit in the main MCU universe at some point. The only real question is whether Channing Tatum might play him.
We know the X-Men are coming to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in live-action. The groundwork for that has already begun to get laid down in post-credit scenes and brief references. Exactly when or how the X-Men will arrive, or who will be playing the key roles when they do, is still a big question. If people want to see Channing Tatum return, he could. Though I assume he’ll likely do so with an easier-to-understand accent.
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