Channing Tatum Responds to Minions Joke About Gambit's Cajun Accent in Deadpool & Wolverine
No, Tatum wasn't speaking Minionese in Deadpool & Wolverine.
Channing Tatum is revealing his true feelings about those accent jokes in Deadpool & Wolverine. "Who's your dialect coach? The Minions?" Ryan Reynolds' Merc with the Mouth quips about Tatum's Cajun-accented Gambit, referring to the mush-mouthed Minionese speakers from the Despicable Me movies. Gambit being hard to understand is a running joke, with Deadpool referencing the 1996 film Sling Blade and breaking the fourth wall when he claims "we're missing critical exposition" when delivered by the New Orleans native.
In a Vanity Fair lie detector test conducted by his Blink Twice director and real-life fiancée Zoë Kravitz, Tatum was asked whether or not Deadpool's Minion joke was "fair criticism."
"'Fair' is an interesting word in that question," he answered. "No, I don't think that's fair." The lie detector determined Tatum was telling the truth, cher.
Tatum previously told Access Hollywood that the accent joke was scripted by Reynolds, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Shawn Levy, original Deadpool and Deadpool 2 writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and Zeb Wells.
"That was him. There was very little improv. But the Cajun dialect is a very particular one," Tatum said. "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," Tatum added. "[Ryan 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. And then other ones he's like, 'All right, I've got to understand what you're saying now.'"
Reynolds paid sincere tribute to Tatum in a social media post, writing that the card-carrying Cajun is a role "Chan was born to play."
"His story is similar to mine in that he spent a decade trying to put the most comic-accurate version of Gambit on the big screen. Remy LeBeau is grafted to his soul and needs to come out and deal," Reynolds wrote of the unmade X-Men spinoff formally announced by Fox back in 2015. "And Gambit found his author in Chan. He's one of the coolest, smartest characters in comics and still largely unexplored." Reynolds went on to praise Tatum as "one of the greatest, hardest working, kindest people in this entire industry," adding: "I couldn't be more thrilled to see @channingtatum pull Gambit from the dead and bring him to life at the perfect time and perfect way."
