- Lizzy Caplan said the Channing Tatum-led "Gambit" movie she was set to costar in had "a really cool idea."
- Caplan said the film was going to have a '30s screwball romantic comedy vibe set in the superhero world.
- The movie was scrapped after the 2019 Disney-Fox merger, but Tatum played Gambit in "Deadpool & Wolverine."
Lizzy Caplan says the scrapped stand-alone "Gambit" movie with Channing Tatum would have been entertaining, but a project in the superhero genre isn't in the cards for her right now.
"It was a really cool idea," Caplan told Business Insider in the latest installment of our Role Play interview series. "It's kind of odd that it got scrapped. Those movies don't seem to ever get scrapped, but it did."
Tatum's uphill battle to get a movie about the X-Men character Remy LeBeau/Gambit (aka the Ragin' Cajun) off the ground has long been documented.
Five years after the character was portrayed by "Friday Night Lights" star Taylor Kitsch in the 2009 movie "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," Tatum, who previously expressed interest in playing Gambit, was confirmed to be taking over the role in a coming stand-alone film.
In the ensuing years, the movie was delayed by script rewrites and multiple director exits. Tatum, who was set to produce, even reportedly threw his hat in the ring for the director position.
Then, in 2017, Variety reported that Caplan was in talks to play the female lead in 20th Century Fox's "Gambit" film, though additional details were sparse.
Caplan told BI that not only did she sign on for the movie, but she also attended meetings with Tatum and others involved in the project.
"We got down the road, we were gonna shoot it," Caplan recalled. "I think there was a start date. I had had meetings with Channing, and there were a couple different... we had a director, then we didn't, but I had multiple meetings with Channing and the other producers."
Producer Simon Kinberg told IGN in 2018 that the "Gambit" movie would have a "romantic or sex comedy vibe," to fit with the New Orleans thief's persona.
"They wanted to do, like, a '30s kind of screwball romantic comedy set in that world, which would have been really fun," Caplan added.
It wasn't meant to be. The movie was killed after the 2019 Disney-Fox merger. Tatum told Variety in 2022 that the yearslong ordeal left him "traumatized."
"I shut off my Marvel machine," he said. "I haven't been able to see any of the movies. I loved that character. It was just too sad. It was like losing a friend because I was so ready to play him."
Tatum's efforts weren't for nothing, though.
The actor finally got to suit up as Gambit and fight baddies with a kinetically charged deck of playing cards and a glowing staff in the 2024 movie "Deadpool & Wolverine," to much fanfare.
Tatum's comedically over-the-top performance and sometimes indecipherable accent were a resounding hit with audiences, and the actor told Variety he's praying for another chance to play Gambit.
In a lengthy post shared on X days after the release of "Deadpool & Wolverine," Tatum thanked Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds for giving him the opportunity to play Gambit.
"I thought I had lost Gambit forever. But he fought for me and Gambit," Tatum wrote, in part. " I will owe him probably forever. Cause I'm not sure how I could ever do something that would be equal to what this has meant to me. I love ya buddy."
While Tatum is itching to reprise his superhero role, Caplan has made peace with how things ended up.
"Let's just say that was, like, so many years ago," she told BI. "The 'Gambit' thing, that's when those movies were, I guess, probably the best they were. That's when they were dominating in every possible way. "
Caplan added that she's content to have avoided the pressure of being in a Marvel movie.
"I had a lot of stress about doing that kind of movie even then," she said. "So now I'm pretty OK not doing one of those movies. I can hear my manager screaming in the other room."
