Taylor Kitsch Talks The Bang Bang Club, Battleship and a Solo Gambit Movie
Posted 04.23.11 by Ryan
Taylor Kitsch first gained attention for portraying Tim Riggins on the Friday Night Lights TV show, but movie audiences got to know him as the Cajun-accented mutant Gambit from 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
Kitsch followed his performance in Wolverine by joining an eclectic slate of projects: The Bang Bang Club, a drama about four real-life photojournalists that covered the ending of apartheid in South Africa, Battleship, director Peter Berg's adaptation of the Milton-Bradley board game, and Disney's 3-D, sci-fi epic John Carter of Mars.
The Bang Bang Club is Kitsch's latest movie, opening in limited release this weekend, just days after two photojournalists — Briton Tim Hetherington (who co-directed the Afghanistan war documentary Restrepo) and American Chris Hondros — were killed while covering the conflict in Libya. Kitsch plays Pulitzer-Prize-winning photojournalist Kevin Carter, who committed suicide shortly after the events depicted in the movie. Kitsch told Contactmusic that he hoped the movie would help educate the public on the dangers photojournalists undertake to do their job and honor their work and sacrifice.
I think it's a great time for this film. It just makes it that much more relevant. Any attention you can bring to these cats, what they sacrificed, is good. We all take for granted what these guys do out there and what they put out every day.
It (filming) was pretty much a wake-up call for me because we can all be quite selfish sometimes and these guys are risking their lives. The camera is really their gun and their way of making a difference. You never hear about the journalist that rescued someone or did something to prevent something worse from happening... It's a sacrifice that these photographers are making to expose this.
Kitsch moved from The Bang Bang Club to Battleship, which reunited the actor with Berg, who created and produced the Friday Night Lights TV show (and directed the 2004 movie that inspired the series). Kitsch told The Playlist that he and Berg are "very close" and that there was "a lot of trust there" between them. Kitsch said that trust was helpful when creating a movie based on a board game.
I understand that there is an uphill battle. There are all these predisposed ideas what it is. But there is also the consensus of the challenge like alright let’s surprise these guys with something and I think we’ve done that. I think there’s a lot of things people won’t expect within that film. Pete is a very good storyteller. Watch any of his films, he’s never going to have just a pure explosion kind of film. There’s always a beat to that and that was the reason I took the role – to work with Pete again.
Kitsch will work next on director Oiver Stone's Savages, taking the actor further away from another comic book movie role. Kitsch told SuperHeroHype that any chance he might pick up Gambit's staff and deck of cards again would happen, at best, "down the road."
There were strong rumors a while ago, but I haven't heard or seen anything tangible anyways. I know if we do it, it'll probably be down the road and we'll do it hopefully a lot darker. I'd love to play him again, but it's a matter of doing it right, too. There's no point in just doing it for the sake of doing it. You gotta kill if you're going to do it, so we'll see.
The Bang-Bang Club is also currently available on video on demand. Kitsch can then be seen in John Carter of Mars on March 9, 2012, and in Battleship a few months later on May 18.