Bailey Chase, one of the empty eyed hunks who appeared as members of the top secret military group The Initiative in a number of episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer* is running around dropping hints that he’s going to be playing Gambit in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. We narrowly averted having to deal with the second worst X character (first is a tie between Omega Red, Maggot, Stacy X, Shatterstar, etc etc etc) in X-Men 3, but we may have to put up with his card tossing, gumbo bullshit in the Wolvie spin-off film.
Chase spilled the beans to some New Zealand paper while shilling his role in the Holly Hunter TV show Saving Grace:"It’s very confidential and top-secret. I think they’re casting under alias names but for now, he’s called Mr Yellow… He’s about 30 years old, a charming southern guy on the surface but he’s got some ulterior motives going on underneath. By the end of the film, he’s probably not going to be such a nice guy."
Except for the fact that his character may not be such a nice guy, that could be a description of Gambit. I’m going to run all this by some of my sources and see what they have to say – I don’t even know if Gambit is actually in the latest (and strikelocked) draft of the script.
*I’m a big Buffy fan and I still had to look this dude up.