Channing Tatum’s GQ Profile: His 5 Wildest Revelations

Channing Tatum — who shot White House Down, 22 Jump Street, Jupiter Ascending and Foxcatcher within the span of one frenzied year — told GQ in an interview that his busy schedule and the pressure to maintain his recent success can take its toll. “There were four really great projects,” he said of those four completed films, three of which will be released later this year. “[But] I don’t feel like I’m getting to enjoy any of the spoils [of having hit movies] because it’s a treadmill.”

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Here are the 5 most startling things we learned about Tatum, featured on this month’s GQ cover:

He won a rather unusual bet with his 21 Jump Street co-star over how much the film would make.

Just before the March 2012 release of his buddy-cop comedy 21 Jump Street, Tatum bet co-star Jonah Hill that the film would open to at least $35 million. Hill was so certain Tatum was overly optimistic about the opening gross that he promised to kiss Tatum’s, uh, manhood (through his underwear, for what it’s worth) if the movie hit $35 million. The actual weekend gross: $36.3 million. However, Tatum has yet to collect on his prize. “That’s a bad bet to lose — it’s not too good to win, either,” Tatum reasoned.

He wants to lose weight, but he loves to eat and drink.

Tatum was in peak physical form for his starring role in Steven Soderbergh‘s 2012 hit Magic Mike, but he admitted that there is a bit more of him to love at the moment. “I enjoy being comfortable and eating whatever the hell I like,” Tatum said, pointing out that he’s a fan of pizza and cheeseburgers. He would like to weigh about 180 pounds but said he’s currently 25 to 30 pounds over that. He also called himself a high-functioning alcoholic and said, “I probably drink too much.”

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There’s one thing he wishes he could change about his career.

Tatum is happy with the four recent films he got to make, but looking back on it, he “would have done things different.” He said that this might be the first regret he’s ever had about his career, noting about the films, “I don’t know if I gave everything to each one as much as I should have.”

He’s open about his previous dalliances with drugs — and the Magic Mike sequel will address that.

Tatum said that the upcoming sequel, rumored to be titled Magic Mike XL, will focus on his character taking a road trip to two stripper conventions. It’s based loosely on Tatum’s own real-life experiences as a young, somewhat hedonistic stripper. “I want to do the story of when I’m in a dark U-Haul with a bunch of these guys, and we’re doing drugs driving up to the stripper convention,” he said. He also confirmed that he doesn’t have a squeaky-clean past, as he “wanted to walk on the wild side for a second.”

He desperately wanted Soderbergh to return as director for the Magic Mike sequel.

Soderbergh has announced that he has retired from directing films, and so his longtime producing partner, Greg Jacobs, will direct the Magic Mike sequel, with Soderbergh serving as the film’s cinematographer, camera operator and editor. But it took Tatum a while to accept this news. “I lobbied probably harder than anybody else — we had many, many nights of heated debate,” Tatum said. “I was, ‘I don’t f—ing get it! Why?’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t need it.'”

Twitter: @_RyanGajewski

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