Growing up, Tatum played football, soccer, track, and baseball; he has said that "girls were always [his] biggest distraction in school." As a child, he practiced wuzuquan kung fu. Tatum spent most of his teenage years in the Tampa area, and initially attended Gaither High School.
He is the son of Kay (Faust), an airline worker, and Glenn Matthew Tatum, who worked in construction. Growing up, he was full of energy and somewhat troublesome, so his parents decided to enroll him in different sports such as track and field, baseball, soccer, and football to keep him out of trouble.
Born on April 26, 1980, Tatum was 25 years old when She's the Man was filmed in the summer of 2005. That gives him a seven or eight-year age gap with Duke, who would be around 17 or 18 years old in the movie. Tatum's age almost cost him the role of Duke in She's the Man.
An athletic child, he tried his hand at several sports, including gridiron football, and he eventually was awarded a scholarship to Glenville State College in West Virginia. He dropped out before graduating, however, and took on a series of jobs in fields including construction and sales.
— a “mystery comedy” about a “fixer” working in 1950s Hollywood. Tatum, 35, was actually sent to a military school in ninth grade, but never entered the service upon graduation. Instead, he became a model and then an actor and yada yada yada.
We sat down with rising actor and stunt performer Dan Matteucci to discuss his career which has been catapulted by his work as Channing Tatum's stand in and double across multiple projects.
Tatum doesn't have any professional training as a dancer, but audiences are well aware of the talent the actor has when busting a move on the dance floor. It was a talent that was apparent all the way back in Step Up; he showed off his dance moves once more in Hail, Caesar!, in which he had a show-stopping tap number.
Perhaps less conventional than some of the classically trained here, Channing Tatum is no less of a dancer. Before he hit it big, Tatum worked as a stripper at a local night club. Look closely and you'll spot him performing as a backup dancer in the music video for “She Bangs” by Ricky Martin.
Despite his struggles with ADHD and dyslexia, Tatum has been able to learn from mentors and trying circumstances and make a successful Hollywood acting and producing career.
Tatum and Bynes presumably don't stay in touch. But on Wednesday, Tatum was walking the red carpet at the premiere of London's Magic Mike Live, when he was asked about Bynes's recent comments. “I love her,” Tatum said of his long-ago rom-com love interest.
But Tatum broke out with the teen rom-com and then starred in the hit "Step Up." "I love her," Tatum said on Tuesday. "I guess she sort of told me [that she fought to get me in the movie]. I love her."
Channing Tatum has become one of the most consistent box office draws in recent years. The Alabama native famously got his start when he was discovered by a Miami modeling scout while working as an exotic dancer in Tampa. This led to music videos, fashion shoots, commercials, and television work.
He later attended Glenville State College in Glenville, West Virginia on a football scholarship, but dropped out. He returned home and started working odd jobs. Us Weekly reported that around this time Tatum left his job as a roofer and began working as a stripper at a local nightclub under the name "Chan Crawford".
Did Channing Tatum have a dance double in Step Up?
"But I think, if anything, if I had to pick a special thing, one, we do all of our own dancing," Tatum boasts. "There's not one take in this whole movie that we're not doing our own stuff. Not one. We didn't even have dance doubles, much less us not do it."
The 'Magic Mike' star explained he was a late bloomer when it came to dancing and he had to act fast because he wanted to learn how to dance. “It was survival,” the actor said, describing the moment he was taught by a grandmother at one his friends' birthday party.
Before he charmed Hollywood casting directors with his work in Step Up and Stop Loss, Channing Tatum made a living in a Chippendales-style dance revue called Male Encounter.
A free-style street dancer with no formal training, Tatum was chosen for the role because of his natural talent. Producer Erik Feig says that Tatum moves "like water" while Step Up producer Adam Shankman claims Tatum is "one of the best natural street dancers" he's ever seen.
Arnold Schwarzenegger. Partially because filmmakers could not find a stunt double that matched the actor's unique frame, Arnold Schwarzenegger has done many of his own stunts throughout his career. It's no surprise that he was always up for the task, given that he got his start in bodybuilding.
Magic Mike's Choreographers on the Art of a Great Lap Dance. Magic Mike's Last Dance is Channing Tatum's last hurrah—so they went all out creating complex, erotic dancing extravaganzas. Salma Hayek Pinault and Channing Tatum in Magic Mike's Last Dance. Courtesy of Claudette Barius for Warner Bros Pictures.
