Channing Tatum covers Details February 2102. In the interview with the magazine, the 31-year-old actor dishes on his career and his future plans, and recalls the days when as a child living on the bayou in Mississippi used to shoot guns with his dad. “When I was a kid,” he says, “we lived on the bayou in Mississippi. My dad would throw a beer can into the water and have me shoot at it. Once, when I was really little, we had this huge double-barrel shotgun, and when I tried it, it literally blew me off the dock.”
Tatum also talks about the films he did and says he knows he’s not the best actor. “You gotta do the ‘Dear Johns’. You gotta do ‘The Vow’. I’m conscious about why I did those parts, those movies,” the hunk told ‘Details’. “I wanted to learn from Rachel on ‘The Vow’,” he says speaking about his costar Rachel McAdams in a drama about a man who is fighting to win back his wife after a car accident leaves her with severe memory loss. “I wanted to learn from Lasse Hallström on Dear John – he did The Cider House Rules and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. I didn’t go to acting school, so my knowledge of story, filmmaking, and character comes from just being on set and doing it. I know I’m not the best actor,” he says. “But I hope my characters are getting better.”
The actor also confesses that, “I really don’t want to be in any more movies that I don’t produce. Unless it’s with one of the 10 directors that I really want to work with, I don’t have any interest in not being on the ground floor of creating it.”
Channing Tatum is married to actress Jenna Dewan whom he met while filming ‘Step Up’ in Baltimore seven years ago. The couple have a pit bull, Lulu. “Want to see dirty dancing?” Tatum asked the magazine’s reporter. Lulu trots over to the far side of the patio. When Tatum snaps his fingers and commands “Dirty dancing,” the muscled pooch—in her rhinestone-studded pink leather collar—charges toward him. She leaps high into his arms, and he thrusts her upward until she’s suspended over his head in a balletic lift. Then the two twirl around, poolside, illuminated by twinkle lights. “You jumped the gun,” Tatum says to the dog. “We’ll do it over.”
Tatum admits that he stays at the office even until 4 a.m., brainstorming or writing snippets of scenes or making clay torsos. “Jenna’s not always happy when I come home that late,” he confesses, “but I’ve just got to get it out.”
Speaking about working on ‘Magic Mike’, Tatum admits that he provided the context and many of the stories, but the script is Reid Carolin’s whom he met while shooting Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss. “To clarify,” Tatum says, “it’s not really my story. It’s really about that world: the people and the decisions you have to make. It’s not as dark as you might think. Soderbergh really had a clear vision as far as not making it overly sexual, overly dark.”
When asked about what they are toasting, Channing says that, “Isn’t it obvious? We’re just getting started with our lives, just figuring out the rest of it. The creativity is in place, the sex is good. There’s really only one toast to make.” Then, lifting the glass as high as he lifted his dog, Tatum says, “Live forever. Just live like this forever.”
Read Channing Tatum’s full interview in the February 2020 issue of Details magazine.
Photos and video courtesy of Details
