Channing Tatum returns in ‘Magic Mike’s Last Dance’

thrumb. Tatum looks out of his vagina as my wheels make an angry sound.

“This is the funniest thing I’ve tried in a really long time,” he says as I wipe the mud from my eyebrows again. “You’re trying so hard to make conversation with me, and you’re banging your ass with a wheel and a piece of mud. It is very good.” T-he-he.

“I like to laugh” Tatum told me earlier that morning. “I like to find fun in things.” We were sitting outside at a restaurant in Williamsburg (where Zoe Kravitz lives), which specializes in bagels—which was a shame, because Tatum can’t really eat carbs. “My face gets really fat really fast,” he explained. Once, to please his ex-wife, he hired a vegan chef to wrap everything in bread. “I’m getting fatter, fatter, fatter,” he said, his hands moving away from his face to indicate that his head was expanding like a floating balloon. He added that this was also funny.

Like many kids who wander about attention and energy overload, Tatum learned early on how to use humor to distract and diffuse tension, a strategy that seems to have morphed, as he’s gotten older, into a sort of worldview, an ability to see the bright side in situations he might find. Others are uncomfortable or unpleasant. “I don’t want to go all out, but I think that’s kind of my coping mechanism in life, it’s finding pleasure.”

“This is going to be crazy,” he told his friend as they clad in thongs at Joy, the Tampa strip club where he began dancing at age 18, reducing the experience to an anecdote as funny as it was going. This look came in handy in Hollywood, an industry that can be similar to strip clubs, where one can easily end up in a bad spot.

“The industry is pretty cruel if you have a spark of creativity,” says Reed Caroline, who is in his early 20s and working as an assistant director on the 2008 film. stop loss When he met Tatum. Tatum was playing a soldier, the kind of role that, as a muscular white man with a hint of brutality behind his eyes, he was asked to play several times over the next few years, including in Dear John, JJ, Haywire, romanian film, eagle. “We quickly realized that the only way we could make it in the industry was to create and retain ownership of our materials,” says Caroline, who became a friend and business partner with Tatum.

They formed a production company they called 33 & Out, with the goal of working hard – and having as much fun as possible – until they hit the so-called Year of Jesus, at which point they’ve made peace. “Go live on an island somewhere,” Tatum told me in 2011.

When Steven Soderbergh, who directed Tatum Foolish, They expressed interest in directing a film about Tatum’s past life as a stripper, so they jumped at the opportunity. Caroline, who had never sold a feature film script before, began working on a story they saw as similar boogie nights or Saturday night fever: A darkly comic tale about a young man who enters a world that is outwardly exciting but ultimately very dark. “Because this world is not rosy,” Tatum points out. “Some of the worst people I’ve ever met in my entire life have been in that business.”

Then again, a movie about the worst people in the world doesn’t sound very interesting. “So Chan thought maybe we can kind of clean it up and make it something different,” Caroline recalls. The end result — a romantic thriller about a sexy stripper with a heart of gold who works his way toward his dream of owning his own company — was even more fun.

Sandra Bullock, “like every other woman in America,” rushed to the stage, where she recognized the man grinding in four steps—a signature move old faithful Tatum calls—like the one that crashed her birthday party a few years earlier. “The dance floor has never been so happy,” she recalls.