Training Gambit: consulting on X-Men Origins: Wolverine

I have kept those pages. Perhaps one day they become the book I keep threatening to write, recounting some of the more improbable things this career has thrown at me. For now, the condensed account.

I very nearly said no

Training Gambit. The most remarkable part is that when the opportunity first arrived, I did not really understand what it meant or what a privilege it was. I came close to turning it down, because I did not much like the idea of teaching tricks and card work to a celebrity.

It turned into some of the best days of an already fairly strange life.

Working with Taylor Kitsch

Realistically, I could not have been happier with the actor I got. What is not obvious from watching a finished film is the sheer volume of preparation, and Kitsch trained every aspect of the role.

By the time I met him the lines were already learned. That was never the issue. He put the time into card work, and not just the mechanics of it, but the detail: flicking cards at distance with genuinely startling accuracy, dealing an entire table using nothing but the movement of one thumb.

The casino scene in the finished film does not show anywhere near everything he trained for. The work was to build an arsenal of card flourishes that could be drawn on as needed. Some are obvious on screen, the fancy dealing, the shuffles, the fans, the flicking. A good deal more was learned and never used.

Given the time he had, he did a superb job. Sitting just out of shot beside the camera during those takes was an odd kind of pride. One of the sleights he learned on the fly made it into the official trailer.

Everything that happened off set

What I did not anticipate was the friendship.

Between the racetrack with Kitsch, Hugh Jackman, Daniel Henney and several others from the cast, and a paintball match against a group of my own martial arts students, in which he and I ended up the last two standing before he comprehensively annihilated me in the final exchange, it was not the job I had pictured when I nearly said no to it.

There were stretches of filming where we would spot paparazzi wedged into genuinely improbable hiding places, trying to get a glimpse of anything at all connected to the film. And there were quiet drinks by the beach with friends, which is a strange sentence to write about a work trip.

What I took from it

Two things.

The first is how much unseen work sits behind a few seconds of screen time. An audience sees a character who is effortlessly good with cards. They do not see the weeks that bought those seconds. That is true of my own work too, and it was useful to watch it from the other side.

The second is simply that the interesting opportunities rarely announce themselves. The best job I have had arrived looking like a slightly irritating request to teach card tricks to an actor, and I almost passed on it.