According to Horberg, Pandolfini also lent some real-life expertise to the series’s depiction of the world of high-level chess in the mid-20 th century.
So, Pandolfini taught members of the Gambit cast how to play the game-“he’s the godfather of chess and I deeply adore him,” series star Anya Taylor-Joy tells T&C-but that isn’t all he offered. It was a real moment of kismet to find that he had a connection to the author and original material he even came up with the title.” I brought him to lunch, and it turned out he had been hired by the publisher to be Walter Tevis’s consultant on the book. Pandolfini was the first guy I called when Scott Frank and I finally realized we were going to revive this project. “The character Ben Kingsley plays in that movie is based on him. “I produced the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, and one of the people I met in the course of making that was Bruce Pandolfini, who’s a chess Grandmaster,” says William Horberg, an executive producer on the series.
