Channing Tatum’s New Interview in Fall/Winter 2007 Issue of VMan Magazine

In a previous post, I told you about Channing Tatum being in the latest issue of VMan Magazine. Well, I was finally able to find of the issue and now we have another great interview from Channing in the dual-covered Fall/Winter 2007 issue of VMan.

We learn some of the following interesting facts about Channing Tatum:

• How Channing has a fascination with soldiers,
• How he’s not a very “political” person, but manages to play a lot of very political people in films (i.e. ‘Battle in Seattle’, ‘Stop Loss’),
• How even though he has not always wanted to be in movies, acting is now truly his obsession,
• How he gets teased about the infamous rooster modeling picture,
• Why you should never call him a “former” model, and
• How he has a great idea for a musical that he would also like to play in one day.

It’s a great interview that gives us another glimpse of who Channing is. You can click on the high quality scans below to view the beautiful photo shoot and to read the entire article. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

You can read the article in it’s entirety below:

There is a long line in Hollywood for models who turn themselves into actors. But somehow 27-year-old Mississippi native Channing Tatum has skipped to the head of it—and into a string of intense projects with some of film’s biggest rollers. The latest is Stop Loss, directed by Kimberly Peirce (of Boys Don’t Cry fame). Tatum plays a trigger-happy U.S. soldier who tries to convince his best friend (Ryan Phillippe) not to go AWOL and to return for another tour of duty in Iraq. After that buddy war movie comes a cop movie, Battle in Seattle, the story of the 2005 World Trade Organization riots. And then there is The Stanford Prison Experiment, a remake of the acclaimed German drama Das Experiment.

It’s a long way from his youth—a childhood in Mississippi and Miami, and then discovery by a modeling agent that imported him to New York and into campaigns for D&G, Armani, and Abercrombie & Fitch. It’s also far from his frothy early days in the film industry, which he claims to have fallen into accidentally: silly roles in She’s the Man and Step Up led to a well-reviewed turn in 2006’s A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, a gritty story about Astoria street kids, which opened the floodgates. Today he’s in negotiations to star as a few more officers and soldiers, in Oliver Stone’s revisitation of the My Lai massacre and an adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’s romantic army novel, Dear John. His next film, Parkour, is a thriller set in the world of urban street running. But what Tatum really wants to do is a musical.

MICHAEL MARTIN Why did you want to do Stop Loss?
CHANNING TATUM My grandfather was in the military. He was in the Korean War. I’ve always had a fascination with soldiers. I’ve always respected what these soldiers were doing, and I wanted to show them in a good light. It was all about the bonds that are forged in war, and how much war can change someone—to the point that you don’t recognize each other as friends.

MM What’s your view of what’s going on in Iraq?
CT I’m not very political. When I started the film, I hung out with the soldier that the film is roughly based on. He was a sniper in the Army. I asked him, “What do you say to people who are so opinionated?” And he said, “I would say, ‘Where did you get the information?‘ And they say, ‘I saw it on the news or I read it in a book or in a newspaper.‘” And he would say, “Exactly. You weren’t there.” And that’s where he would leave it. The more I tried to figure out the politics, the more I felt like I didn’t know anything. So I just focused solely on what it meant to be a soldier.

MM For someone who’s not political, you’re doing another very political film—Battle in Seattle, about the WTO riots.
CT Yeah, this time I’m on the law side. I play a SWAT cop. It was weird—the whole film is basically a huge riot, and it was kind of real. I went into that job thinking the cops were wrong. Now I’m on the fence about it. I remember seeing these documentaries, seeing them beating the hell out of protesters. But shooting the film, you’re standing on the sidewalk, seeing these extras running toward you, and you’re telling them to stop and they’re not stopping. You don’t want to get physical, but they’re getting physical with you, and your job is to stop them. You can’t just look at the camera and say, “Uh, they’re not stopping.” It got kind of scary for a second. I thought, Oh my God, I could see how it happened in real life. I think it’s important to recognize there wasn’t a full-out right and wrong, but a lot of miscommunication.

MM Have you always wanted to make movies?
CT Absolutely not. This is something that has come on in the last four years of my life. I’ve only been acting for three years. It just fell in my lap. I took an acting workshop and I’ve been obsessed with it ever since. Like obsessed. It’s kind of sad. I don’t do anything else but sit and read and write and go to class.

MM It seems like you parachuted into Hollywood and everyone wants a piece of you.
CT That’s not the way it was at the beginning. I did Coach Carter, and I didn’t work for almost a year. No one wanted to give me the time of day.

MM How did you go from a teen film like She’s the Man to something like A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints?
CT Saints was, in my mind, my baby. When I first read that screenplay, it didn’t have any money to be made. I thought, I was one of these guys. I just know these guys so well. I met them and said, “I have to play this character, please.” They didn’t want me at first. The real character was Italian and 5‘8”. I think they scoured all of New York for the real guy. They wanted to cast it with street kids. Needless to say, that didn’t happen.

MM Have any of your modeling pictures come back to haunt you?
CT Nope. I do get teased about one shoot I did. My friends say, “Nice picture with the cock”—I’m holding a rooster or whatever. But I’m not embarrassed by it whatsoever.

MM When you Google your name, some of the stuff that comes up is pretty naked.
CT I think it’s the nature of the male-modeling industry. For guy models, it’s less about clothes. I’ve never had a problem with that. All my baby pictures around the living room are naked. It wasn’t a real stretch for me.

MM Still maintaining your abs?
CT Not really. I drink beer and eat cheeseburgers every day. Everyone’s like, “Wait ‘til you hit your 30s—stuff’s not going to fall off as easy as it did.” I was going to play a meth addict in a film, and it wasn’t falling off as easily as it did two years ago, when I’d start working out three weeks before a job. In Stop Loss, I’m a big, meaty redneck. I’m not in shape at all in that movie. I don’t think in every movie you should have abs and pecs. It doesn’t really make any sense.

MM Are you officially a former model?
CT I don’t know. Photo shoots are fun every once in a while, if you get a photographer who’ll let you do emotion or some scene with a person. Modeling was fun—it took me all over the world. I guess I don’t know what you can call me. But I wouldn’t like to be something formerly.

MM What movies do you want to be doing?
CT I want to be doing projects that I really believe in and that I’ve had a huge hand in creating. There’s a musical that I would really love to do about the dust bowl and the Great Depression. It’s called The Carnival Project.

MM Is this a musical you’ve made up and want to write?
CT I don’t know how to write a musical; I’m not that musical myself. But I love dancing, and I love that whole world, how you can sort of live outside of reality. My girlfriend had a dream that she was in a carnival. I said that’s interesting, and we just started talking about it, and from there it blossomed. I love photography. There are some beautiful pictures from that era that inspired the hell out of me. Once I started to research that era, this whole Wizard of Oz thing sort of shaped up in my head. Now I have to give it a little more shape and then go see if anyone is interested in it.

MM Do you sing?
CT The character I would like to play would be a clown. There would be some singing involved. I don’t want it to be like a belting sort of musical, I kind of want it to be more watchable. I’ve seen musicals where they sing the whole time and they’re brilliantly done, like Moulin Rouge. But they’re really hard to stay with. It’s like, “I need a break for a few seconds.” This will be a bit more weird, with edge, like O Brother, Where Art Thou?

MM Had you danced before Step Up?
CT I’ve danced my whole life, but I hadn’t taken a class. In Florida there’s a huge dancing population. There’s this thing called quinceañeras. When you’re in like seventh through ninth grades, there’s a quinceañera every weekend. I got tired of being this tall, skinny white kid who couldn’t dance, so I had to start.

MM Why do you want to do a musical?
CT We have all this technology to do anything our imagination can create, and we don’t do it. We stick to blowing up buildings and car chases—which are great. I go to every single one of those movies. But we all used to sing when we were 4 or 5 years old—we would run around singing and dancing and playing cowboys and Indians. Somewhere along the line we stopped doing that. I think musicals get back to that.

Love Channing Tatum?
Stay in the Know…Subscribe to Channing Tatum Unwrapped: Email | RSS

Related Posts:

• July 2, 2009 -- CTU EXCLUSIVE: Check Out Channing Tatum in the August 2009 Issue of Vanity Fair
• March 15, 2009 -- NEW FLASH: Channing Tatum’s New Comic Book Released for ‘G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra’
• March 11, 2009 -- IN THE PRESS: Channing Tatum Featured in April 2009 Vanity Fair
• January 17, 2009 -- FIRST LOOK: Channing Tatum’s New Action Figure for ‘G.I. Joe Rise of Cobra’
• February 25, 2008 -- AROUND THE WORLD: High Quality Scans of Channing Tatum in the UK’s Lad Mag, Sugar, and Shout Magazines