Top Cop

Channing Tatum is firmly ensconced on Hollywood’s A-list these days, courtesy of the box office hit Dear John (2010) and his current film The Vow, which has already taken in more than $100 million at the box office. When he goes out, it’s not unusual for him to be chased by screaming women. That’s all right, though, because the 31-year-old actor is used to the feeling.

“The first time I felt truly famous was years ago, when I did a Mountain Dew commercial,” says Tatum, who grew up in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. “Where I come from, holding a Mountain Dew on TV is a very big deal. It was so weird for my friends to see me on TV. My friends were actually like, ‘Chan, what are you doing on TV?’ They didn’t get it.

“I’m always going to be Chan to them,” he says. “Now I’m in Hollywood, and they still don’t get what I do for a living.”

What he’s doing is taking over 2012 at the multiplex with The Vow, the current action hit Haywire and three more films yet to come.

“It’s the Year of the Chan!” Tatum says with a boisterous laugh. “I would love to have my own animal. There has been a rat and a dragon, there could be a chan. I’m going to propose that to China.”

It’s hard to argue with a man who’s still selling tickets for The Vow and Haywire even as the big-screen version of 21 Jump Street prepares for its US opening on Friday. Later in the year will come G.I. Joe: Retaliation and Magic Mike, in which Tatum plays an upstart male stripper in a film by Haywire director Steven Soderbergh.

“Honestly, I had no intention of having five movies come out in one year,” Tatum says, relaxing on a couch at a Los Angeles hotel. “Two were supposed to come out last year.

“It’s a high-class problem,” he admits, “but they’re all very different films or I’d be completely freaking out.”

PAIRING UP

In 21 Jump Street, based on the 1980s television series that launched the career of Johnny Depp, Tatum and Jonah Hill play underachieving rookie cops sent undercover as high-school students in an effort to sniff out a drug ring. The film is already gaining rave reviews in the press for its charm and chemistry between the leads.

“I remember the original show,” Tatum says. “The show and the movie are near light years apart. This is a funny movie, no matter where it came from or if it was a TV show. I just was petrified that I couldn’t be funny.”

Ultimately he trusted Hill, a more experienced comedian who executive produced the movie and was, in fact, the first person to pitch it to Tatum after they ran into one another at a Hollywood restaurant.

“He said, ‘I’ve got the perfect part for you,’” Tatum recalls. “You hear that a lot, but then I got the script and it really was good.”

“The casting was unusual,” Hill says in a separate interview, “because we haven’t seen Channing do this kind of thing, which made it feel fresh. I wanted to get him out of his element.”

“I was terrified,” Tatum admits. “I made Jonah promise that I could be funny. I told him, if he didn’t make me funny, then I’d hurt him.”

“I was just so scared that I actually made him funnier than me in the film,” Hill says, laughing.

Tatum plays an academically challenged former jock who discovers that his type isn’t as popular in the real world as he was in high school. It got the actor thinking about his own school years.

“This popular stuff in high school wasn’t based on my real life,” he says. “I don’t know if I was popular if I wasn’t in the middle of a sports season. I certainly wasn’t in the cool-kid group. I was pretty good at sports. That was my claim to fame.”

It wasn’t until he saw the film with early test audiences, Tatum says, that he finally was convinced that he’d handled the comedy right.

“You do all this work,” he says, “but there’s nothing like seeing it with an audience, getting a rush off of feeling their rush. They’re laughing at stuff you didn’t think would get a big laugh.

“It’s actually gut-busting,” Tatum says. “At a screening a guy laughed so hard that an ambulance had to come. He was laughing so hard, his chest started to hurt. And then he died.

“Just kidding about the last part,” he adds, and laughs.

Born in Cullman, Alabama, where his mother was an airline staffer and his father a construction worker, Tatum spent his childhood in Mississippi, then went to high school in Tampa. He played baseball, American football, soccer and track in high school, and also did martial arts. He won an American football scholarship to Glenville State College in West Virginia, but turned it down in favour of another passion: acting.

He began his career as a fashion model, then appeared in television commercials for Pepsi and Mountain Dew before making his big-screen debut in Coach Carter (2005). From there Tatum’s career blossomed, bringing him lead roles in such films as She’s the Man (2006), Step Up (2006), Stop-Loss (2008), Fighting (2009), G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009), Dear John, The Eagle (2011) and Ten Year (2011). He played Pretty Boy Floyd in Public Enemies (2009), and did a comic turn in The Dilemma (2011).

SLOWLY BUT SURELY

Offscreen Tatum is married to actress Jenna Dewan, his Step Up co-star. Hollywood history doesn’t show a great many successful marriages between co-stars, but Tatum is confident that he and Dewan will beat the odds.

“I don’t think that people take enough time to get to know each other on a lot of different levels,” he says. “I took basically five years to get to know my wife. We’re coming up on seven and a half, eight years together now, and married for two and a half.

“I just don’t think that people go at it in the right way anymore,” Tatum continues. “It’s such a culture about right now. Everything is instant, like texting. Everything is so far away from each other. These things are made for communication, but I feel like they just bring us farther and farther away. I can see you, but I can’t touch you and I can’t hug you.

“It’s just not good enough,” he says. “You don’t get to really get back to the basics like, ‘Can we actually cohabitate in a small area together? Do I get (ticked) off that you leave the toothbrush everywhere or you leave your shoes on the stairs?’”

The actor adds that he and Dewan live their two-career life by a two-week rule.

“We don’t go longer than that, and usually a lot less, when it comes to seeing each other,” he explains. “It’s just too hard to be apart.”

As for children, Tatum and Dewan are taking their time on that as well.

“You ask yourself the big moral things like, ‘How do you want to raise children?,’” he says. “That’s the next big hurdle.”

If the rest of his 2012 films score hits at the box office, Tatum’s career opportunities will be virtually limitless. The only problem is, he professes to have no idea whether they’ll do well or not.

“I think I’ve been lucky lately,” he says. “I still don’t know what makes a hit. What works, what doesn’t work? Don’t ask me. I just pick movies I’d like to see. I pick people I want to work with and that I respect. There’s no real math to it.

“You try to make good value plays in life. I could go on with a bunch of (garbage) about making sound creative decisions, but the truth is that it’s a game of chance. Just like anything else, you’ve just got to follow your heart.”

(Cindy Pearlman, New York Times Syndicate)