“He’s an actor who can completely transform himself,” says Pathfinder director Marcus Nispel of Jay Tavare, who plays a Native American warrior in the action-adventure film, set to open September 8. Photo: Carole Joyce

On principle, Jay Tavare doesn’t gamble. Except for one time a few years ago in New Mexico when he unwittingly invoked the Apache spirits and won $3,300. It was during the final day of filming Ron Howard’s The Missing. A hopeful crowd of key grips, gaffers, makeup artists, and actors had gathered around Tommy Lee Jones for the ritual end-of-shoot money draw. Beside him, a bag stuffed with signed $20 bills—makeshift lottery tickets—had been collected from most of the cast and crew.

Tavare’s faintly initialed bill was somewhere in the pile. He wasn’t expecting to win, nor did he really want to rob some bottom-rung production assistant of the biggest payday of his life. He was just keeping it all fun when he approached Tommy Lee Jones and the bag of loot at the last minute, waved his hand over it like a 19th-century Apache medicine man, and playfully chanted “Goozhoodash!”

“It’s like a magic prayer,” Tavare explains. “In Apache, it means ‘let all good things happen.’ Basically, you’re surrendering to the will of something higher than you. I was still dressed in the medicine man costume of my character, Kayitah, who had repeated that phrase over and over again during a scene in the movie. So on the last day of the shoot, everyone was pretty familiar with the phrase ‘Goozhoodash.’”

It drew a laugh from the crowd and also an expected gibe from Tommy Lee Jones: “Kid—I don’t think you get it. The movie’s over.”

Then Tommy Lee drew the winning $20 bill, which was (do we even need to tell you?) initialed “J.T.”

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