Notorious Celebrity Interviews: Channing Tatum for GQ, 2009

[frejasface]

Some celebrity interviews go off the rails and end in flames of notoriety. One of these is a 2009 profile of Channing Tatum for GQ.

How wild is this interview?

Well. Here is the first paragraph:

• 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.”
  
  
  
  The Full Tatum
  by Jessica Pressler
  
  [Channing and the interviewer decide to go camping, then get wasted and stoned.]
  
  
  
  
• Interviewer: “Are you sure you want to do this? It’s going to be freezing cold out there.”
  Channing: “It’ll be fine. We have Snuggies. Tee-hee-hee."
  
  
• 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, bors, or criminals. But in real life he’s like a big, good-looking Tickle Me Elmo. “Tee-hee-hee."
  
  
• He impulsively buys two bottles of Patron (“This is going to be so fuunnn.”) and two Snuggies because they are “hilarious.”
  
  
• He and the interviewer go to an old-timey ghost town, where he gets terrified by a mannequin. “Holy shit! There’s someone in there,” Chan had said, clutching my arm. “It’s a mannequin. Ahhhhh! Holy fuck that mannequin is scary. Holy FUCK.”
  
  
  
  
• Marlon Wayans on Tatum's modeling skills: “[A] pretty-ass Blue Steel face.”
  
  
• A director on Tatum's acting skills: “He’s almost like an Al Pacino or a Sean Penn, in that he’ll be doing a scene where he’s telling this woman he loves her and you feel like he’s going to kill her.”
  
  
• On set for the movie "Fighting," Chan and his co-stars Terrence Howard and Peter Tambakis had a game where they would punch each other as hard as they could.
  
  
• He once snuck up on Marlon Wayans while the comedian was having a pool party. He stripped off his clothes and pretended to be robbing Wayans's house. Then, he joined the pool party.
  
  
• His former wife, Jenna Dewan, is programmed into his phone as "Baby Butt."
  
  
• It genuinely did not occur to him that sleeping overnight with another woman was weird:
  
  Jenna said, “‘You know that’s kind of weird, right?... I mean, that you’re sleeping in the desert overnight with a girl?’ “
  
  Chan, to whom this hadn’t occurred, apologized profusely.
  
  “It’s fine,” she said. “I just wanted to note that it is kind of weird.”
  
  “Okay,” he said. “I’m sorry, baby.”

Word of wisdom from Channing Tatum:

• "Hahahahaha! My publicist is going to kill me. Tee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!”
  
  
• Channing Tatum, hungover: "I’m having a beer... You should have one, too.It’ll make us both feel better.”
  
  
• He knows he's a hot dum-dum: “No one’s calling me for lawyer roles.”
  
  
• On Jägermeister: “Nectar of the gods!”
  
  
• On his future plans: “There are so many things I want to do... Like, I want to get an artist, a musician, a photographer, and a bunch of dancers that I know and just travel across Africa and just film it and just see what happens."
  
  
• "On Step Up, I was going to do this backflip off the car. That’s something I do, like, all the time. I just do backflips off things."
  
  
• His final quote: “How are you even going to write this thing? There’s not enough pages to encapsulate everything. If you need notes, just call me. Tee-hee-hee."

Poll

Read more notorious interviews with Chris Evans, J.Lo, Kate Winslet, and Beyoncé.

source