These scene stealers are about to make a name for themselves. Since Ke Huy Quan’s O.B. and the Daniel Kaluuya-voiced Spider-Punk rocked the multiverse (in 2023’s Loki season 2 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, respectively), the ComicBook Golden Issue Awards have celebrated the best scene-stealing supporting players in TV and movies. This year, we narrowed the nominees to five, with honorable mentions for Wicked breakout Marissa Bode (who made her feature film debut alongside the gravity-defying Cynthia Ervo and Ariana Grande), Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda (who splashed onto the scene as Moana’s adorable little sister Simea in Moana 2) and Venom Horse (the symbiote stallion from Venom: The Last Dance).
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Marvel Studios’ box office juggernaut Deadpool & Wolverine reintroduced the oft-forgotten heroes of the Void, a multiversal junkyard where Human Torch (Chris Evans) ended up with Elektra (Jennifer Garner), X-23 (Dafne Keen), the X-Man Gambit (Channing Tatum), and the one and only Blade (Wesley Snipes). A Quiet Place prequel Day One, set in an eerily quiet New York City, featured one cat to rule them all: Frodo (played by animal actors Nico and Schnitzel), feline friend of alien apocalypse survivor Sam (Lupita Nyong’o). Javier Bardem let the spice flow as Stilgar as the fatherly mentor to Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) in the Denis Villeneuve-directed sci-fi epic Dune: Part Two. And the orangutan Raka (voiced by Peter Macon), the last-surviving sage of the Order of Caesar, put his stinking paws on our damned dirty hearts in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.
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The winner of ComicBook.com’s 2024 Golden Issue Award for Best Scene Stealer is…
Channing Tatum’s Gambit in Deadpool & Wolverine.
A master thief turned card-carrying member of the X-Men, Gambit made his live-action debut (played by Taylor Kitsch) opposite Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and Ryan Reynolds’ Merc without a Mouth in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
In 2015, Fox announced another X-Men spinoff: the Tatum-fronted Gambit movie with Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) and later Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) attached to direct. The Logan Lucky and Magic Mike actor was set to star as ragin’ Cajun Remy LeBeau, with Spectre‘s Léa Seydoux cast as Bella Donna Boudreaux, leader of the Assassins Guild (rival of Gambit’s Thieves Guild). But Gambit just wasn’t in the cards, and the unmade movie languished in limbo. Or, rather, the Void.
Nearly a decade after Tatum took the stage with Deadpool‘s Ryan Reynolds at San Diego Comic-Con 2015, Tatum’s Gambit shuffled into the Marvel Cinematic Universe as part of the cameo-filled Deadpool & Wolverine. When the titular heroes are pruned by Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) of the Time Variance Authority, they’re sent to the Void from Loki: a “metaphysical junkyard where anything useless goes before it gets annihilated forever.”
That includes heroes from defunct franchises, including the hot-headed Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four, the sai-wielding assassin Elektra from Daredevil and her self-titled 2005 spinoff, Logan‘s Laura Kinney/X-23, the Daywalker vampire slayer from the Blade trilogy, and the card-slinging Gambit, who speaks with a barely-understandable Cajun accent. (The script describes Tatum’s Gambit, codename “Gatsby,” as “sex on legs.”)
“You know how long I’ve been waiting for this?” Gambit says in a meta moment of the fourth wall-breaking blockbuster. “I’m about to make a name for myself.” With his comic-accurate trench coat and staff, a scene-stealing Gambit did just that. And according to Reynolds, who co-wrote the script with director Shawn Levy, Marvel is “obsessed” with Tatum’s take on the character. Reynolds has even offered to play “fifth banana” should Disney-Marvel move forward with the long-unmade Gambit movie.
“Gambit is a guy 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,” Reynolds shared on Instagram. “Remy LeBeau is grafted to his soul and needs to come out and deal. And Gambit found his author in Chan. He’s one of the coolest, smartest characters in comics and still largely unexplored.”
“I want more — and from what I saw in theaters, you do too,” Reynolds continued of the moviegoers who made Deadpool & Wolverine the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time. “Having the chance to say goodbye to some of these heroes is as important as having new characters to root for… and rooting for Gambit is easy. Rooting for Chan is even easier. He’s one of the greatest, hardest working, kindest people in this entire industry. I couldn’t be more thrilled to see [Tatum] pull Gambit from the dead and bring him to life at the perfect time and perfect way.”
Ça c’est bon.
Best Scene Stealer Nominees:
- Frodo the Cat (A Quiet Place: Day One)
- Gambit (Channing Tatum, Deadpool & Wolverine) — WINNER
- Laura/X-23 (Dafne Keen, Deadpool & Wolverine)
- Raka (Peter Macron, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes)
- Stilgar (Javier Bardem, Dune: Part Two)