How not being cast in ‘No Country for Old Men’ redefined Channing Tatum’s career: “I didn’t care”
He’s a tough one to work out, is Channing Tatum.
You tend to think of him as a bit of an action star due to his sizable presence and films like White House Down, but the truth is he’s more of a comic actor than anything else, and a very good one at that. He’s also worked with some of the finest directors in the game, including Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh, so he must be doing something right.
This year, he starred in the curiously overlooked Roofman, an unlikely true-life story about a struggling father and former veteran prone to robbing stores by cutting a hole in the roof and dropping inside them, who gets stuck inside a Toys ’R’ Us for six months. While not many went to see it at the cinema, it has since been a word-of-mouth hit and is expected to do well once it arrives on streaming sites.
Tatum especially got a good deal of acclaim for his performance as the main character, and it underlined his abilities as a capable leading man, a year after he gave what many thought was one of his career’s best showings in Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice, a psychological thriller about a twisted, uber-rich tech mogul who invites a load of people to his private island with predictably nefarious intent.
The actor has clearly come a long way since finding fame in the sports/dance flicks Coach Carter and Step Up, via stripper drama Magic Mike, and he showed the first signs of how varied he could be in the 2012 Jonah Hill comedy 21 Jump Street (“My name Jeff!”) and the sequel 22 Jump Street two years later. He also gained high praise for his serious role in the wrestling drama Foxcatcher with Steve Carell.
Ironically, it was thanks to auditioning for a much straighter movie that set Tatum on the path to success, and a role that, try as you might, you can’t picture him in, which is a testament to the fact that casting directors get paid big bucks to make the right decisions.
He told Gold Derby: “I went on the life-changing audition, which was for the Coen brothers for No Country for Old Men. It was for the character Josh Brolin played. I knew I wasn’t right; I was probably 10 years too young. But I didn’t care: they were open to meeting me, and I wanted to meet them.”
Tatum, it seemed, was just happy to be in the room with the already-legendary directorial pairing, even if he knew going in that a positive result was unlikely. The film went on to gather huge acclaim, and Brolin would win a Screen Actors’ Guild award for his portrayal of the briefcase-stealing anti-hero Llewelyn Moss.
Tatum added, “I knew I wasn’t getting it, no matter how much I went in there and nailed this and wanted it, so I let it go. And I walked in and was like, ‘Jesus, it’s good to meet you all. This is insane, man, I love you guys.’…I knew I couldn’t do it right, so I was just going to go in and let them direct me.”
The Alabama-born actor has since gone on to make more than 70 movies and directed his first film in 2022. He now has eight different movies coming up in various states of production, including a role alongside virtually every other A-lister in the next Avengers film, Doomsday, due late next year, plus Calamity Hustle, a film co-starring Ryan Reynolds about a pair of brothers who are detectives and criminals.
