Channing Tatum on ‘Roofman,’ ‘Avengers: Doomsday Return and More

Channing Tatum has a bum leg. If Tatum hadn’t injured himself shooting “Avengers: Doomsday” in London recently, this profile would have a much more strenuous central set-piece. “We’d probably be bowling or something if I wasn’t like this,” he says, after walking into our lunch meeting with a pronounced limp. For the remainder of the production so far — “We had tons more shooting,” Tatum says, including a “big fight” with Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom — Tatum was sidelined, sitting in for close-ups and allowing his double to take on the heavy stuff. Today, he says, he’s taken the day off his pain meds “so I wouldn’t be falling asleep on you and drooling. My body doesn’t do well with codeine — and those painkillers the U.K. docs gave me were strong.”

Intensive physical therapy — and wrapping the “Avengers” shoot for a 2026 release — lie ahead. “It’s not about the pain I feel in the moment,” Tatum says, his legs outstretched under the table on a Santa Monica hotel rooftop. “It’s knowing I can’t take this back. And now I know what the next six months of my life will be like.” It’s a nagging reminder that a leading man known for his athleticism is fragile too. “I just hate getting old,” Tatum says. He’s 45, but even in the midday sunlight, he looks much younger — or maybe it’s just that the image of him from films from “G.I. Joe” to “Magic Mike” overlays his face as we speak. He feels younger than he is too. “In my mind, I’m literally still 30 years old — 26, if I’m honest.”

It makes sense, then, that he felt at home shooting his latest movie in a toy store. In “Roofman,” out Oct. 10, Tatum plays real-life master criminal Jeffrey Manchester. In 2004, Manchester broke out of prison, where he’d been serving time for robbing McDonald’s franchises in order to provide for his daughter; he hid for months in a Charlotte, North Carolina, Toys R Us store, sneaking out to live an odd double life, up to and including starting a romance with a local woman, played by Kirsten Dunst. By day, Tatum’s character sleeps in a quasi-dorm-room setup behind a wall; by night, when the kids leave the store, he’s able to live his life. (The toy store is real, by the way — the production found and refurbished an abandoned Toys R Us in North Carolina, after the chain filed for bankruptcy in 2017.) 

Tatum hoists himself in and out of Jeffrey’s hiding spot and runs through the aisles like an overgrown kid while the store sits quiet at night, but his great achievement may be his stillness as he’s trapped behind a wall and plotting how he might improve his desperate situation. He’s frenetic and soulful, alternating moment to moment, in a movie whose playful, hard-to-pin-down tone feels plucked from an earlier era of studio moviemaking. This film — a crowd-pleaser in the vein of “Thelma & Louise” — is something Tatum couldn’t have done in his “Step Up” days, or any moment but now.   

The actor felt a new confidence in taking on the part, having successfully returned from a four-year break with the drama “Dog,” which he co-directed and produced, and the Sandra Bullock comedy “The Lost City.” Both were hits, proving Tatum was still a star who could pack in movie theaters as the business recovered from COVID. “A lot of people leave and nobody cares,” he says. “It’s not like the industry says, ‘Oh, no, we’ve got to stop making movies.’” Before his hiatus, he’d been at a crossroads: Feeling forever 26 is great, until one begins to realize the roles are staying the same too. “I was working too much. I got burned out,” he recalls. “I was questioning if I ever should have been in this business, because I didn’t feel I was good enough. And I got to a place where I didn’t know what I was doing. No one tells you how to do fame.” 

His “Roofman” director also was reasserting himself after a break. Derek Cianfrance, known for moody stories of parents and children, became a revered figure on the American indie scene in his late 30s with the films “Blue Valentine” and “The Place Beyond the Pines”; after wrapping his HBO limited series “I Know This Much Is True,” he felt tapped out. “I had spent 15 years exploring legacy, inheritance, sins of the father — you name it. And with ‘I Know This Much Is True,’ I finally completed the cycle,” Cianfrance tells me on a morning walk near his home in Brooklyn. The show came out in May 2020, at the height of the pandemic: “I remember feeling like my well was dry, and I was just waiting for it to rain.” A year into his break, Cianfrance heard the legend of Jeffrey Manchester.  

Cianfrance and I are speaking in Prospect Park, a few days before I’m to meet Tatum; it’s important to the director to paint a picture of how he met his leading man, in this same space, to pitch him on “Roofman.” As we approach the park’s picnic house, Cianfrance lowers himself to the sidewalk, facing away from the broad view of meadow from where we’re standing, and assumes a sort of squatting lotus position. Then he clambers up, hands first, propelling himself like a jack-in-the-box. He’s reenacting Tatum’s reaction to spotting him on the day they sat down to discuss the project — his future leading man seemed as excited as a kid in a toy store. “Of course, he didn’t have to use his hands,” Cianfrance says with a laugh.   

There’s an overgrown-kid energy both to the story and to Cianfrance’s glee in restaging it, and little wonder: A leading man worried he’d been pigeonholed and a director who’d pushed so far into emotional intensity that he needed to bring himself back decided, in the park, simply to play together. “It was the moment,” Cianfrance says, “that I was sure he could be the guy.”

---

Their Prospect Park meeting wasn’t, in fact, the first time Cianfrance and Tatum met. At the very beginning of Tatum’s career, Cianfrance asked him to star in the project that would become “Blue Valentine,” the long-gestating, heartbreaking relationship drama featuring Michelle Williams and, in the Tatum role, Ryan Gosling. Cianfrance had seen Tatum’s breakout film, the 2006 Sundance sensation “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints,” the actor’s first substantial role after being discovered as a model, and says he considered him an heir to Marlon Brando: “He’s got this physicality — this body that can tell stories.”  

It’s an intriguing alternate history, one that likely would have changed the trajectory of both the film and Tatum’s career: Gosling’s problem-drinking raging romantic is riskier than the kinds of characters that Tatum has played until “Roofman.” Tatum didn’t recall turning Cianfrance down at first. “I think I blocked it out because I probably, on some level, regret it,” Tatum says. “When I really look back on that moment, I was scared of it, because I hadn’t really lived it.” 

Instead, Tatum embarked on a career that, prior to his break, developed its own momentum, beyond his control. The bright spots were very bright: “Magic Mike,” based on Tatum’s experiences as a male stripper in his youth, became a sensation in 2012 (and generated two sequels); that same year, “21 Jump Street” proved Tatum’s comedy chops (it got a sequel too). And “Foxcatcher,” in 2014, turned Tatum’s charisma inward as the actor played an Olympic wrestler in the thrall of a mentally ill philanthropist. But these experiences stood apart. Generally, any Tatum hit begat dozens of offers just like it.   

After the “G.I. Joe” franchise — a vexing contractual obligation that “just happened to me” and that Tatum knew “wasn’t going to be as good as I wanted it to be” — his career shifted into an ever-more- commercial lane. “With ‘Dear John’ and ‘The Vow,’ I became that guy, and ‘Jump Street’ rescued me out of that. But now I’m the ‘Jump Street’ guy. After I did ‘White House Down,’ I told my managers, ‘If I have a gun in my hand, don’t send it to me.’” Tatum doubted the “White House Down” script but was talked into it by Amy Pascal, Sony’s studio head at the time, and he learned a valuable lesson: “Better to have enjoyed doing the movie and thought that the process of making it was worth it. Because you have a kid now, and you had better be able to answer to her, ‘Why weren’t you there?’” (Tatum has a 12-year-old daughter, Everly, whom he raises with his ex-wife, Jenna Dewan.)

“Roofman” presented an opportunity to do work worth the time away from home. There’s a reason the film opens with a chyron instructing audiences that what they’re about to see is a true story; otherwise, it’d seem frustratingly implausible. Manchester knocked over some 40 to 60 McDonald’s franchises, sawing in through the roof after careful study, and was notably kind to the employees he’d sequester in the freezer before seizing the cash. His eventual escape from prison was similarly methodical: He used a self-crafted plywood-and-cardboard panel to conceal himself in the undercarriage of a truck leaving the facility, then hitched his way to Charlotte. In this ripped-from-the-headlines Robin Hood saga, Cianfrance saw the story that would bring him back to filmmaking, and got his number to Manchester, who, incarcerated once again, can only make outbound calls.  

“He’s a tall-tale teller,” Cianfrance says. “But the tales that he’s telling are all crazy and true. They’re backed up by the police record.” The director estimates he and co-writer Kirt Gunn spent 400 hours speaking to Manchester on the phone. Tatum would eventually speak to him as well.   

“He knows exactly how to move the conversation along, and take care of you in it,” Tatum says. “He understands that you don’t understand exactly.” Tatum was trepidatious about playing a living person again after “Foxcatcher”; the real-life version of his character in that film, Mark Schultz, was on set to watch a dramatic depiction of the torment he faced at the hands of feckless heir and benefactor John E. du Pont (played by Steve Carell), including the eventual murder of Schultz’s brother (Mark Ruffalo). Schultz objected to many elements of the film, including the implication of a sexual relationship between the fictional version of himself and du Pont, and called the film “a sickening and insulting lie,” though he later apologized. 

Trying to reconcile Schultz’s expectations with Hollywood reality still haunts Tatum. 

“I remember having a conversation with him, and I hope never to have a conversation with Jeff about this,” Tatum says. “He was really fixated on ‘You’re going to win awards.’” Tatum’s voice shifts into a quieter register as he recalls trying to talk Schultz down: “Mark, I’m not going to win anything. I’m not even going to be nominated. Hear me. Because I don’t want you to be disappointed.” (Tatum, the film’s lead, was not Oscar nominated, but co-stars Carell and Ruffalo were.) “And it was just heartbreaking. And I wasn’t sure if I wanted to play anyone that I got to meet again. Because it was pretty traumatic.” For his part, Tatum thinks the movie was, if anything, overly generous in giving motivation to the character that Carell played: “Du Pont — the guy was just a crazy person. I think we gave more to him emotionally than there probably was. I didn’t see a ton of redeemable stuff there.”   

“Foxcatcher” was glowingly reviewed. But it was unremittingly dark, so much so that it turned some audiences off. 

But in Manchester, Tatum found something worth the risk: The criminal lived by a code. Real-life footage that airs during the film’s closing credits makes clear he was not merely nonviolent but unexpectedly kind to his victims — among them the woman with whom he built a relationship based on lies. And Tatum leverages his charisma into a character turn that’s searching and heartfelt. “I hope that Jeff loves the movie,” Tatum says. “I hope that Jeff loves the spirit in which we made it, because we tried to walk the line of not making him the hero — and also loving him.”   

At least one early review is positive: For obvious reasons, Manchester hasn’t seen a cut of the film. But in prison in North Carolina, he saw local news coverage of the trailer for the movie based on his life, and called Cianfrance: “He was like, ‘I saw Channing with a pair of Heelys, in his underwear, and sunglasses and a teddy bear around his neck.” (The trailer, pushing comedy, spotlights Tatum in his “Big”-esque roves around the store at night.) Cianfrance explained that the look hadn’t been planned — he’d been setting up a shot, and Tatum had been entertaining himself with the props. Cianfrance doesn’t allow stars to use trailers on his sets, so Tatum was just … there.   

“Jeff said, ‘I’m really happy to hear that,’” Cianfrance continues. “‘I’m just so happy to hear that Channing got a chance to connect to his inner child like that.’”   

---

In conversation, Tatum is at once considered, speaking thoughtfully about his time away from the industry, and shoot-the-shit free. His inner child comes out most vividly when discussing his daughter. (When I mention that my older daughter is 5 years old, he tells me, “You’re about to go into the most yummy stage! From 5 to 12 has been my favorite.”)   

On set, Cianfrance’s insistence that they refurbish a defunct Toys R Us in Pineville, down to the colored tiles on the floor, gave Tatum space in which to frolic. “My process is about immersion,” Cianfrance says. “I think about it as an aquarium — anytime we would make a kitchen, it’s always important that there were forks and knives in the drawer and food in the cupboard.” And when he stocked the Toys R Us, that meant Tatum’s co-stars would include  Tickle Me Elmos with their incessant giggles and bikes for him to ride all night long.  

Cianfrance’s method — throwing actors into the experience and asking them to work out the scene’s choreography together — can be challenging. “It makes it frustrating for a crew sometimes, because I don’t set down marks,” he says. “I let the actors have complete freedom in a space — they can say anything they want.” (One notable example of actorly freedom: a sequence in which Tatum is showering in the Toys R Us bathroom and is confronted by an intruder, which means he must escape by sprinting through the store fully nude. “We shot about 12 takes,” Cianfrance says. “Channing is just fearless.”) 

The production’s spontaneity was welcome for a leading man whose career had come to feel overly programmed. Tatum didn’t  rehearse with Dunst: The first time he saw her on set was for a scene where the two attend a singles mixer at Red Lobster. “Just walk in and go,” he recalls. Having only glancingly met Dunst before the film, Tatum was impressed: “She’s not a diva, where she could easily be, and have earned that. And she’s not. She wants to have a cigarette and a whiskey with you and talk shit.”  

Tatum prepared for his role in private. Checking in with his leading man two months before the shoot, Cianfrance was surprised at his size. Tatum had just wrapped the indie “Josephine,” for which he’d had to gain weight. Tatum asked if it might be a good idea to slim down to play a wiry infiltrator of buildings, and the director agreed; then the actor just “showed up to set 65 pounds lighter,” Cianfrance marvels.   

“I blew up to like 240,” Tatum says. “I was a big boy.” Getting ready for roles was nothing back when Tatum was the age he still feels inside. “I used to take 30 pounds off in three weeks,” he says. “I was just starving. The model diet.” Shedding pounds these days isn’t as easy, or as unhealthy, as just crash-dieting. “I have a great nutritionist, and she’s helped me eat vegetables,” Tatum says. “I don’t like vegetables. It’s a texture thing.” (His lunch order: Coca-Cola and a bacon cheeseburger — hold the lettuce and tomato.)   

The leanness and intensity of the production — a 35-day shoot, with only 11 days in the main location — were exhilarating but wearying. Cianfrance had reassembled his entire crew from the micro-indie “Blue Valentine,” who found that even as they’d all achieved new heights in their careers, they still had surprisingly little time and money to work with on this film. “‘Blue Valentine’ was like an Off Broadway show,” he says. “We had gotten to places in our careers where we were on Broadway. The assumption with this was we had another Broadway production — but all of us were asked to go back to those roots. We were making a studio film with no fat.”   

Which is the kind of studio film that rarely gets made anymore. Glimpses of a Blockbuster location in the early-2000s-set film are no accident: That’s where Cianfrance fell in love with movies, picking at random from VHS dramas that have since been pushed off the shelf by franchise fare.    

If all of this contrasts with other work Tatum has done … well, that’s why he’s doing it. The first time Tatum saw the movie — which Cianfrance, not precious about seeking feedback, aggressively screened
for cast, crew and acquaintances — he was horrified. “Anytime I see myself on the screen,” he says, “it doesn’t feel like a real movie. I see everybody giving these incredible performances, and I don’t believe myself.” When he screened it again, he felt something unexpected: pride. “I always felt like the radio contest winner,” he says. “I got called in at the right time, and I got the tickets backstage, and no one told me to leave. And once you let all that go, then you can really start.”   

---

As Tatum’s career began to accelerate in the late 2000s, he auditioned for a Marvel movie, but he didn’t care much about the outcome. (Chris Hemsworth landed the role of the hammer-wielding superhero.) “I didn’t really want to be Thor,” he says. “But I wanted to audition in front of Kenneth Branagh.”  

It didn’t take long for Branagh, the director of “Thor,” to diagnose something Tatum already saw
in himself.  

“After I did one take, [Branagh] was like, ‘You’re not allowed to move. Put your hands on this chair.’ And I froze,” the actor recalls. “He nailed my crutch. I spent the next five years really trying to learn stillness.”  

But Tatum’s next big role will be as an agent of chaos — and ironically enough, it’s for Marvel. The “X-Men” character Gambit — a roguish, polymorphously perverse New Orleanian mutant — is close to his heart: Tatum was supposed to play him in a solo film that never came together, and he finally appeared as the character in last year’s “Deadpool & Wolverine.” Now, he’s playing him in “Avengers: Doomsday.”   

Tatum had worked hard to co-direct “Gambit” himself with producing partner Reid Carolin, and got close, but the deal fell apart in 2019, when the X-Men moved over to Disney after Disney’s acquisition of Fox. “The universe just saved us,” he says. “We would have failed so hard.” Tatum sidesteps a question about whether joining Marvel now — at a moment when many industry observers think the brand is past its peak — made sense. “My singular focus was Gambit,” he says. “He likes women, he smokes, he drinks. He’s not just a save-the-world kind of guy — we need those, but we need contrast.”   

He notes that even after Gambit proved an appealing addition of flavor to “Deadpool & Wolverine,” popping up among a crew of allies that included Jennifer Garner’s Elektra and Wesley Snipes’ Blade, executives “really had to wrap their mind around the accent and how people are going to understand him.” Tatum’s response? “I’m not gonna go full Cajun.” Directors Anthony and Joe Russo “want things to be funny, but they don’t want to go full ‘Deadpool.’ They want to keep the drama and keep it tight. When Gambit gets serious — when he drops the Mardi Gras mask — things do matter.”   

Tatum is wistful as he recalls the long shoots in London. “My daughter’s here. Marvel’s never going to shoot anywhere here. Movies never shoot in America,” he says. (“Roofman” makes for an obvious exception to this generally ironclad rule of modern Hollywood.) Tatum asked Everly if he should sign on to play Gambit: “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do ‘Avengers,’ because I was going to have to be gone, but I was like — it’s OK. She’s going into middle school now.” 

He’s tried to find a lesson for his daughter in his absences. “Did Daddy get to go to work? Or did he have to go to work?” he recalls asking Everly. “Those are two different sentences.”   

On “Roofman,” sprint though it was, he got to go to work, in part because playing a character who misses his daughter had a therapeutic element. (Of course, nothing beats the real thing: “I don’t care how you grew up! I think everybody needs therapy,” he says.) Asked about Manchester’s estrangement from his daughter, Tatum is surprisingly candid: “I know for a fact I’m able to understand it. Jenna and I are good now, but it was a painful break to have that fall apart, especially being so young. We tried to keep it together, tried for a year and a half, but we knew it was …” He stops himself. “Not to go into all that. It’s in the past. But it’s really tough not to have your daughter half the time. I wish I could just have her all the time.”   

Everything in Tatum’s life brought him to a place where, when given an opportunity unlike the things we already knew he could do — big laughs and swoony-but-stoic romantic leads and dancing his ass off — he was ready to say yes. “I’ve lived six or seven different lives,” he says. It’s not about translating them to the screen directly, as “Magic Mike” famously did, but about transforming them: “Life gives you fuel. If you’ve really been heartbroken, and really been in pain, and felt real, true aloneness … I’ve experienced enough life that I have something to offer. The technique, and the ability to actually deliver.”  

But will audiences pick up what he’s putting down? Toronto, with its emphasis on general audiences and its historic bias toward crowd-pleasers, seems an apt launchpad, but tonally hybrid dramas for adults are far less safe bets than “Avengers: Doomsday.”  

“I wanted to make a movie I can watch with my family,” Cianfrance says, demurring when asked about his hopes for the project. “I have no idea — you can’t have any expectations.”   

Tatum has nerves about the overall state of the industry. “This whole thing is upside down right now,” he says. “The streamers came in and effed up the industry a bit — for good and for bad. The studios are confused; the streamers are confused.” He notes that streamers paying better money up front has created a topsy-turvy system of incentives: “You’re incentivizing me to go make a subpar movie — a B script, a programmer that isn’t special.” (Tatum is notable among his peers for never having made a streaming-first movie, although the final “Magic Mike” installment, from 2023, was intended for HBO Max. Though he praises Warner Bros. film chiefs Pamela Abdy and Michael De Luca, who called it up to the big screen late in the game, for their love of film and risk-taking, he wishes he and director Steven Soderbergh had known it would be a theatrical play from the first: “We would have made it less of a misshapen object — we didn’t have a traditional feel to it, and focused on the love story.”)  

“Roofman,” with a love story at its center and a sympathetic protagonist, could be the latest original movie to do well this year; its distributor, Paramount, reaffirmed its commitment to investing in original movies after its sale to Skydance. 

Whatever the future holds, there’s one potential audience member who matters most, even if he may not be able to see the film until 2036, when he’s expected to be released from North Carolina’s Central Prison.   

“We dreamed as big as possible, and we were just within the edge of our means,” Cianfrance says. “That’s also Jeff Manchester. Making this movie, building that Toys R Us, was an extreme choice, and Jeff pushed it as far as he possibly could. Jeff was our North Star.”   

The one blessing to Tatum’s busted leg is that it’s cleared his schedule so that he can finally pay tribute in person to the man who’s inspired this shift in his career, and his approach to work. “I’m going to have to see him at some point — maybe toward the end of the year, now that I’m not going to be shooting,” he says. He wants to have the experience of looking in Manchester’s eyes and gauging an energy that can’t be transmitted through phone lines. “I think he is a hustler, by his nature. But that doesn’t make him a bad person.”   

After all, people hustle for many reasons: love of family is one. So is a certain pride in what one is able to get away with, the thrill of learning new tricks and showing them off. Tatum, now, can understand that.   

“It’s a funny joke in my head, but … I’m going to do the big Marvel stuff and then help with gorgeous filmmakers and characters that I can flex some of the shit I’ve learned in the last 20 years,” he says. “I keep saying it. I’m going to do a 10-year-run.” He grins as he thinks about all the roles that lie ahead. Maybe getting older isn’t such a bad thing, as long as you keep your inner child close.

---

Location: The Savoy London; Styling: Martin Metcalf; Grooming: Talia Sparrow/A Frame Agency; Production: Joon Creative;

Tatum Fashion, Look 1 (rooftop): Coat: Brioni; Jacket: Brunello Cuccinelli; T shirt: Margaret Howell; Jeans: Levi’s; Boots: Jimmy Choo; Look 2 (inside): Shirt: Dunhill; Top: Tom Ford; Trousers: Ami Paris; Shoes: Jimmy Choo

Cianfrance Fashion, Look 1 (rooftop): Jacket: ISTO; Shirt: Margaret Howell: Trousers and shoes: Brioni; Look 2 (inside): Cardigan: Brioni; Shirt: Ami Paris; Trousers: Paul Smith; Shoes: Brioni