20 Things You Didn’t Know About Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
12. “Then It Seems You’ve Outlived Your Contract.”
Bruce Feirstein named Henry Gupta after a Gupta Bakery in Los Angeles, but envisioned the character as being an Indian in his late 20s.
However, the producers were impressed by American magician and sleight-of-hand expert, Ricky Jay and cast him in the role instead, reimagining him as a 1960s radical computer hacker who “now sells his politics for cash”. Nevertheless, Jay asked Feirstein not to change the character’s name.
Gupta was also meant to use playing cards for fatalistic purposes as Jay had written a book entitled Cards as Weapons in 1977. A deleted scene from the film showed Gupta exercising his deadly skill whilst awaiting news of the sinking of HMS Devonshire; he would then have narrowly missed dealing James Bond a fatal blow with a playing card at the headquarters of the Carver Media Group Network in Saigon. Sadly, due to the film’s approved running time, both scenes were cut from the movie.