Actor Taylor Kitsch seems like a sharp young man with a career that really could be huge. After spending years as part of the cast of NBC’s popular show “Friday Night Lights,” he was cast as the popular “X-Men” character Gambit in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Next summer is going to be big for Kitsch as he’s playing the title character in Disney’s John Carter of Mars, directed by Andrew (WALLE) Stanton, and a key role in Peter Berg’s Battleship, both of which look to be big movies as well as ones we’ve seen almost nothing for so far.
But first, Kitsch can be seen in Steven Silver’s The Bang Bang Club, a portrait of the group of photographers who captured the atrocities during the later years of Apartheid in South Africa on film, pictures that caught the world’s attention. Kitsch plays Kevin Carter, the member of the club who took his craft to rock star levels, doing drugs and eventually killing himself after a controversial photo he took seemingly turned the world against him.
Ryan Phillipe plays Greg Marinovich, the newest member of the Bang Bang Club–the film is based on the novel of the same name he wrote along with fellow member João Silva–and Malin Akerman plays the photo editor whose support helps the Bang Bang Club achieve global recognition.
In our video interview, which you can watch below, we talked about how he came onto the project and tried to learn as much about the person he was playing as he could and how this movie relates to recent events in Libya where a number of photojournalists including Oscar-nominated director Tim Hetherington were murdered. We also got in a few questions about Battleship and John Carter of Mars–he was a bit worried he may have told us too much about the latter–as well as asking whether we’d ever see him as Gambit again.
The Bang Bang Club is now playing on Video on Demand, but it will open in New York and L.A. on Friday, April 22.
