How Ricky Jay nearly blinded 007 in Tomorrow Never Dies

Ricky Jay has racked up an impressive résumé, appearing in cult TV shows like Deadwood and X-Files and movies like Tomorrow Never Dies, Mystery Men, Boogie Nights, and many of the films of his good friend and collaborator David Mamet. But acting is really just a sideline for Jay, who is perhaps the world’s greatest living illusionist, the author of several books, a popular live performer, and one of the brains behind Deceptive Practices, a which provides consulting expertise on a wide range of arcane matters - reports AVClub.

Jay was asked about his role in the 1997 James Bond film "Tomorrow Never Dies", when he played Henry Gupta.

RJ: Yeah, the father of techno-terrorism. A part that was originally cast for a 25-year-old Indian man, so I’m not quite sure how I convinced Roger Spottiswoode that that would be a good role for me, but I did somehow.

AVC: Did they change the part after you came onboard?

RJ: They did. At one point, they wanted me to throw cards as weapons to attack Bond, but the first time they asked me to do it in rehearsal, I was an enormously long distance away from Pierce Brosnan, and I warned them that the cards went very, very hard and fast, and they said no no, they had someone in front of it to block the shot, and I again said, “I don’t think you should do that,” they said, “No, no, it’ll be okay.” And Pierce seemed to be fine with it. So I whaled a card, I don’t know how, 50 or 75 feet away, and they said, “Just throw it at his face,” and I hit him right above the eye, and realized that I almost ruined the most lucrative franchise in the history of film. Suddenly that scene was no longer in the movie. [Laughs.] So in a way that was horribly disappointing, but the rest of it was fun.

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