When it comes to great acting, some people like to measure the distance between the performer and the role: The more significant the transformation, the more successful the performance.
I won’t argue that point, though a better metric to measure might be the distance between the actor and the audience. Channing Tatum closes that particular gap to a millimeter: When someone wounds him — whether with a punch or a rejection — you’re not watching it happen to someone else. It happens to you, too.
Not every movie star has that gift, but in “Roofman” (in theaters Oct. 10) he makes the most of it. Based on a true story, the film stars Tatum as Jeffrey Manchester, a down-on-his-luck war veteran who carried out a series of unusually polite McDonald’s robberies in the early 2000s. Though he’s eventually busted and sent to prison, Manchester escapes and hides out for months at a Toys “R” Us store, where he falls for a beleaguered employee (Kirsten Dunst).
There are comic high points — including a frantic and naked scramble when Manchester is caught showering in the store after hours — but most of the movie operates in a grounded, lived-in register that suits Tatum down to his bones. Other actors might have tackled the material with a wink, but Tatum plays Manchester like a real guy, communicating all he needs to with a flinch, a blink or a head hung just a little lower.
This kind of naturalism, which Tatum refined in several films with Steven Soderbergh, rarely gets its due: Make it look effortless and people assume it must be easy. But these days, the sincerity that is Tatum’s stock in trade is in short supply. Between “Logan Lucky” in 2017 and “Dog” in 2022, when Tatum stepped back from leading roles, I was struck by how thin the field looked in his absence. Most of the men cast in parts he might have played felt glib by comparison.
Do we undervalue what Tatum is capable of as an actor because it’s not arrestingly showy, larded with accents and prosthetics in an obvious bid for transformation? Last month in Los Angeles, I found myself arguing that point with someone who can barely stand to watch Tatum onscreen, who for a long time believed that nothing the actor did could measure up to even your average, classically trained British thespian.
It just so happens that the person I was arguing with was Tatum himself. Maybe, by the end of this article, I’ll convince him I’m right.
HE LEAPT IN from a patio at the Hotel Bel-Air with an offer. “What do you want?” Tatum asked by way of introduction, scanning the room’s spirits. “Would you like tea, water? A beer?”
It’s almost pointless to describe what Tatum is like in person since he was exactly what you’d expect: enthusiastic and exuding brotherly bonhomie. Still, as we sat outside and poured some tea, the only thing that really surprised me is how quick Tatum can be to dismiss himself.
“So many people are so good at talking about these things and sounding very, very eloquent and I don’t know how they do it,” he said, confessing to some nerves about our interview. “Sometimes, the more I talk about what I tried to do on the movie, the less I even understand it.”
This turned out to be far from the case, though I soon learned that Tatum likes to set expectations low. He frequently shares stories about friends and fellow artists who believe in him more than he does, and though at 45, he has branched into producing, co-writing and co-directing — moves that actors often make to safeguard their image — he still struggles to watch the movies he stars in.
“And I think I will forever,” he said. “When I see my face on the screen, I just physically can’t do it.”
That discomfort dates to the beginning of his career, since acting was never his plan. After taking odd jobs in Florida as a roofer and a stripper, he was scouted off the street to work as a model, and then landed a Pepsi commercial: “I was like, ‘Oh, acting’s way more interesting than just standing in front of a camera and flexing and being naked.’”
Still, he likened the opportunity more to winning the lottery than something he had earned on merit. As Tatum’s star rose in movies like “Step Up” and “She’s the Man” (both from 2006), many dismissed him as just another hunk, as though there were 10 just like him growing on every palm tree in Los Angeles. “I knew that I was always going to be ‘the thick-necked, jock ex-model,’” he said. “Starting out, I’d get ‘Thug No. 2’ or ‘Cop No. 1’ in auditions, and that makes sense, right?”
Every so often, people seemed to realize that Tatum was capable of more. By the time he starred in “22 Jump Street,” a Variety review observed that “Tatum has been too good too many times now to still be deemed a revelation,” though that was all the way back in 2014 and it still feels, even now, as if people always have to rediscover his talent anew. Tatum himself sometimes needs some encouraging: Despite a shattering performance in the Oscar-nominated “Foxcatcher” (2014) and projects with acclaimed directors like Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers, he still has trouble believing that he fits in.
“I felt like I was just barely hanging on in a lot of those movies,” Tatum said, acknowledging an impostor syndrome that has proved difficult to shake.
“I also have felt not part of the club, so I get it,” said Dunst, his “Roofman” co-star. When I profiled her four years ago, Dunst had not yet received her first Oscar nomination, and “The Power of the Dog” was about to spark a career reassessment for a star whose gifts had long been taken for granted. She hopes that “Roofman” will encourage a similar re-evaluation of Tatum, praising his ability to be utterly present and natural in a scene.
“I don’t think he’s had a performance that’s given him the opportunity to be this open in his vulnerability,” she said. “To come in with that openness is the hardest thing. It’s acting on a deeper soul level rather than coming in with a plan.”
Tatum acknowledged that, in many ways, “Roofman” is one of the most significant projects he’s ever done. “I’ve never been put through the paces harder than on this film,” he said. “No matter how the movie turns out or if people like it or if it makes money, I know that I did everything I could, and that’s all I can really hope for after doing this for 20 years.”
He paused. Had he really been at this for more than two decades? Sometimes you have to acknowledge something before it actually sinks in.
“That’s crazy to say out loud,” he said.
DEREK CIANFRANCE HAS wanted to work with Tatum for nearly that long, after first catching him in the 2006 indie “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints,” playing a brooding street tough. “He had a boxer’s face and a dancer’s body,” Cianfrance said, “and I thought that contrast in him — the beautiful and the wounded, the masculine and the vulnerable — was so clearly present.”
The director had pursued Tatum back then to star in his bruising marriage drama “Blue Valentine,” but Tatum turned him down: At the time, he hadn’t experienced the kind of heartbreak the role required and he was worried his performance would seem insincere. (Ryan Gosling ultimately starred opposite Michelle Williams.)
“I didn’t want to fail,” Tatum said. “I was too afraid to do it and I didn’t believe in myself as much as Derek did.”
Despite that turndown, Cianfrance kept an eye on Tatum over the years. “I just thought, here’s a guy who’s the whole package — he can do everything,” Cianfrance said. Little things continued to nudge him toward the star, like the time one of Cianfrance’s friends went to a wedding where he knew no one and was immediately adopted by Tatum, his table mate.
“He thinks it’s his responsibility to take care of people,” Cianfrance said.
That was the same quality he wanted for Manchester, who is driven to a life of crime to provide for his daughter. After meeting with Tatum for a different project, Cianfrance was inspired to rewrite “Roofman” for the actor.
“My job as the filmmaker was to embrace and nourish all those different sides of Channing that I had seen for the last 20 years in movies and try to bring it into one character,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that when people sat down in the movie theater, they saw all of the possibility and potential of Channing.”
Tatum was flattered by the offer but wary about what he might have to mine for the role. As a young man growing up in Tampa, Fla., he had often felt himself only a few bad choices from ending up on a path like Manchester’s. And playing a divorced parent in turmoil would mean revisiting the end of his 13-year relationship and marriage to the actress-dancer Jenna Dewan, with whom he shares a daughter, Everly.
“I didn’t know how to be a single father and I wanted to make sure that I had a good relationship with my daughter, and that just became my singular focus,” Tatum said. That priority drove his yearslong hiatus and all the projects he’s picked since, which he now weighs against how present he can be as Everly gets older. If he wanted to commit to “Roofman,” he wouldn’t do so by half-measures. It would have to be worth the sacrifice.
Putting all of that feeling into his performance tested Tatum’s mettle in a way no movie had before, especially when working with Cianfrance, who prizes verisimilitude to an unusual degree.
“I’ve always considered myself like a documentarian of fiction,” said Cianfrance, who once asked Gosling and Williams to live together in their “Blue Valentine” house for a month, even when the cameras weren’t rolling, to strengthen their familial bond.
For the “Roofman” scene in which Manchester is sentenced, Cianfrance recruited the same prison guards and judge from the actual trial to put Tatum through his paces, cuffing the actor beneath his clothes as he’s led from the holding cell to the courtroom to be sentenced to 45 years in prison. The moment felt so overwhelmingly real that afterward, Tatum told Cianfrance that filming the sequence had been one of the three worst experiences of his life.
“When he said that, I knew just how deep he was going to go,” the director said.
Tatum concurred. “I had to walk through the woods on this one and not really know what was going to come out on the other side,” he said. More than anything, though, he learned just how much he could relate to the desperate lengths Manchester would go to for love.
“I’ve struggled a lot with wanting love in my life and I didn’t really grow up, in my opinion, with seeing healthy love and healthy relationships,” Tatum said. “I’ll perform for love, essentially: Who do you want me to be, what do you want me to be, just to love me?”
That hunger to deliver bled into both the character and Tatum’s experience making “Roofman.” On set, it meant that Tatum would follow Cianfrance’s methods wherever they led, even when it made him uncomfortable or when the material cut painfully close to his own life.
“He really wants to be there for people and not to let people down — it comes from his heart,” Cianfrance said. “But as a filmmaker, it’s a blessing to me because he’s never satisfied, and it means that he’ll always push. He’ll do it again a thousand times until he can get it right.”
By the end of shooting, Cianfrance said Tatum was absolutely spent: “I was like, ‘Oh, man, it’s going to take him a while to recover from this guy.’”
Tatum admitted that he still hadn’t fully shaken the experience and maybe wasn’t ready to. He worked with Dunst’s acting coach, Greta Seacat, during production to incorporate dream analysis into his acting technique, and after filming ended, she suggested one final dream exercise to help him release the character.
“I still haven’t been able to do that one, for some reason,” Tatum said. “It’s not that I don’t want to, I just conveniently forget and now it’s almost a year later. Once this movie’s out, maybe I can do it. Maybe I can fully let him go.”
A LITTLE WHILE after our first meeting, Tatum called me and discussed a clip he’d watched from an old “60 Minutes” interview with Philip Seymour Hoffman. In it, the actor described the state of crisis he sometimes felt before embarking on a role. But the way Hoffman put it, that anxiety wasn’t such a bad thing.
“The chaos and the fear focuses you and you have something to push against,” Tatum explained. “Whatever that energy is that’s scattered, you can drive it through the head of a pin because suddenly, everything matters.”
Lately, that perspective has helped Tatum rethink how he wants to approach his career: If a role feels too daunting, maybe that’s a reason to sign on rather than an excuse to say no. He tackled “Roofman” and survived, right? What else might he be capable of?
Two decades in, maybe he’s starting to turn a corner. For a long time, his impostor syndrome was most intense whenever he worked opposite theatrically trained British actors. “They can do anything, and it’s just not the kind of actor that I am,” he said. But when he voiced that insecurity to Benedict Cumberbatch years ago, the response surprised him.
“He was just so gracious in saying, ‘Look you have something that a lot of us don’t have,’” Tatum said, recalling how Cumberbatch praised his authenticity. “Because I respect him so much as an actor, it was definitely a seed of confidence that I needed at that time to plant.”
Now, after “Roofman,” he feels in full flower. “For the very first time in my life, I feel like I could sit across from even the most beautifully trained British actor and go toe-to-toe with them and not feel like I’m apologizing as I’m acting with them,” he said. “I feel like with the next decisions I make in this career, I can start to enjoy it a little more instead of being afraid of it as much as I have been.”
It might take a little more convincing, but maybe he’s on his way, and maybe everyone else will get there, too. Or maybe it’s not so bad if, 20 years later, what Channing Tatum is capable of somehow still manages to feel like a brand-new revelation.
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
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