Home / Poker News September 2013 / Phil Laak’s Near-cameo in Runner Runner
Phil Laak’s Near-cameo in Runner Runner
Posted by: James Carter. - Fri, 2013-09-13 10:31
Runner Runner hasn’t even hit the big screen yet (it is scheduled to premiere on September 18 in Las Vegas) but there has been so much positive vibe in the
poker community about the movie already that it’s bound to become an instant classic, much like Rounders.
20th Century Fox’s motion picture, starring Justin Timberlake and Ben Affleck (in his first ever villain-role no less) is about a Princeton grad student who gets involved in online poker in order to raise money for tuition. He discovers an Absolute Poker/Ultimate Bet kind of cheating scheme though and decides to follow the money he lost to Costa Rica. The head of the offshore operation is Ben Affleck’s character, who decides to offer the protagonist a chance to get in on the operation and the fabulous profits. The FBI gets involved too and Richie (Justin Timberlake) soon finds himself in all sorts of trouble.
While pretty much everyone involved in online poker one way or another is excited about the movie, it’s safe to say none was as excited as Phil Laak when he and Antonio Esfandiari landed a cameo in it. The two of them traveled to Costa Rica for the shoot, but in the end, their scene hasn’t made it into the finished product.
Laak said he wasn’t particularly disappointed that their scene got cut: he said he had never been 100% sure the scene had actually been finished at all, since the rain kept interrupting it.
Laak also said they managed to talk to Justin Timberlake quite a bit and recounted the experience as an overall positive one.
The scene they actually shot had them playing poker on an outdoor veranda, and according to Laak, for something that wasn’t even properly connected to the movie, an awfully lot of work went into it.
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