I wake to see Channing Tatum’s face, framed by a camouflage Snuggie, wobbling above me. “Hey,” he whispers, exhaling a cloud of booze so thick I can practically see it in the chilly air. “I think we should go into the house before anyone sees us out here and shoots us or something.” Near us, beneath the bushes we slept under, are a half-empty bottle of Patrón, a glow stick, an unopened bag of Stacy’s Pita Chips. I’m wearing a Snuggie, too. We are probably not exactly what the residents of this tiny mining town deep in the California desert would expect to find outside their windows.
Wait, pita chips? “You brought snacks out here last night?” I ask.
Tatum starts to giggle. He has a great laugh—a boyish, highly contagious stream of actual tee-hee-hee‘s. It’s not something you get to hear much in his movies, since his chiseled-out-of-a-side-of-beef looks mean he is usually cast as soldiers, boxers, or criminals. But in real life he’s like a big, good-looking Tickle Me Elmo. “Tee-hee-hee. I have to get a picture of this,” he says, standing up and fumbling in his pockets. Then his joyful expression suddenly collapses. “Shit,” he says. “Where’s my phone?”
We search for it, but his iPhone isn’t at our campsite, so we go look in the house. It’s a house belonging to someone called Rusty, who, wherever he is, would probably be flabbergasted to know that the star of such movies as G.I. Joe and the upcoming Roman epic The Eagle—not to mention a journalist from New York City—have just pried apart his La-Z-Boy in search of a piece of technology that, judging from the 1974 copies of Hollywood and McCall’s on his living room table, he does not necessarily know has been invented.
“It wouldn’t be in Rusty’s bedroom, because we didn’t come into Rusty’s bedroom,” Tatum says, tentatively peering at Rusty’s neatly made bed through the open door.
“No, we did,” I say. “Because at one point we were wearing those hats.” I point to the two straw hats sitting on Rusty’s dresser, beneath a sepia-toned portrait of what looks like a dwarf in eighteenth-century dress.
“We were?” Tatum says, crinkling his forehead. Then he remembers. “Oh yeah! And I took a picture of that lady. With my phone. And that was after we left the bar. But was it before or after we went to the jail?”
Tatum starts to giggle again. “We’re in somebody’s house right how,” he gasps. “Tee-hee-hee. How did this happen?”
It’s 7 a.m., so we have an hour to find his phone before the car comes to take us back to Los Angeles. We decide to retrace our steps. I swallow a couple of Rusty’s aspirins. “I’m having a beer,” Tatum announces, cracking open a can of Rusty’s Coors Light. He hands me one. “You should have one, too. It’ll make us both feel better.”
According to Channing Tatum, every night out has its tipping point: “You know, that one part where you’re just like, ‘Is this going to be one of those nights?’ ” He’d said this to me the day before, as we were driving. We had just left Los Angeles in a town car headed for Randsburg, California, an old ghost town where he’d spent an afternoon shooting a short film for his friend, the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and wanted to revisit.
The tipping-point theory also applies to Tatum’s life. Take, for example, the time he signed up to dance in an all-male revue in Tampa. He was living there after giving up a college football scholarship. (School always made Tatum, who has ADD and “something like dyslexia,” bored and restless.) He’d always been athletic, and a dancer, and had gotten bored with the grind of day jobs he’d been working—house framing, cold-calling people for a mortgage company, cleaning cages at “a puppy-kitty nursery.”
“This is going to be crazy,” he recalls saying to a fellow dancer, who is still a friend, as they pulled on G-strings for their first shift at a nightclub called Joy. Then they made a pact: “Okay, we’re go ing to do this for a little while just to be crazy and insane; then we’re getting out.” And they did. Tatum’s stripping experience remained just that—some insane thing he’d done—until the man who hired him for that stripping job sold a tape to Us Weekly in 2009. It shows him, working as Chan Crawford (he still goes by Chan), wiggling in front of a room full of screaming ladies in a tiny thong and copious hair gel. His public-relations team was horrified. This part of his past was meant to be secret.
“I had wanted to tell people,” Tatum said in the car. “I’m not ashamed of it. I don’t regret one thing. I’m not a person who hides shit.”
Nor should he. Steven Soderbergh, the director who cast Tatum in the upcoming spy thriller Haywire, said he’d love to direct the movie of Tatum’s stripping life. And it was some “sketchy dude” who’d seen his work on the stage who planted in Chan’s head the idea to pursue a modeling career. That led to a small part in a Pepsi ad, which led to a leading role in the dance movie Step Up and ultimately put him on a trajectory that has him, at 30, “poised to become the next Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp,” according to Ryan Kavanaugh, whose company, Relativity Media, has produced a number of Tatum’s films. Whether or not that is true remains to be seen. Although G.I. Joe grossed $300 million worldwide and he’s since landed a number of high-profile movies (he just signed on to anchor the movie remake of the former Depp vehicle 21 Jump Street), a lot of people still view him as a handsome, affable beefcake. “No one’s calling me for lawyer roles,” he said. “I still have a lot to do to prove myself.”
We were an hour and a half outside L.A., and the freeway fast-food chains and gas stations were giving way to a rusty Martian terrain punctuated by cartoonish cacti and the occasional bombed-out-looking shed. “How far are we?” he asked. The driver said it would probably be a hour more. Tatum leaned back. “Wait until you see this place,” he said. “I was actually going to camp out. I even brought my bedroll. But I wasn’t sure…”