14 DAY TRIAL // Channing Tatum and Shia LaBeouf starred together in the critically acclaimed “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints,” in which they played troubled youths prone to booze rages and random acts of violence. Back in 2008, Shia told GQ that, during the production, Channing actually had him smash a window and break into a bookstore to steal something.
It’s taken Tatum this many years to finally set the record straight on this very intriguing story – and he’s doing it in a new interview with the same magazine. The handsome actor will be back on the big screen with “Jupiter Ascending” from the Wachowski siblings, in July, so this interview is meant to push the movie.
Shia’s story was that, after getting properly drunk, Channing told him and co-star Peter Tambakis that they should break into a Barnes and Nobles to steal a Spider-Man bookmark. They refused so he did it instead, smashing in the store’s window to get inside.
The idea behind this act of vandalism was to get in character for the film, which is the only part of the account that Channing is now confirming. He insists he can’t even imagine where Shia came up with the rest.
“None of it was true. We were drinking. And I think our initial thing was ‘Alright, let's go out and try and get in a fight!’ This was just young dumb idiot actors thinking that that's going to bond us. Because we'll shed blood together blah blah blah. Just stupid actors thinking that they have to try and be method,” Tatum explains.
“I'm not saying anything about method actors, but to go and try to fight somebody to become the character? I think that's a little immature, in hindsight. But it felt real and sort of visceral at the time. But I don't have any problem saying that I don't know what the hell story he was telling in his interview. I really don't. I've never seen him since then,” he continues.
A window did get smashed in the process, he goes on to say, but it wasn’t from Barnes and Nobles and breaking it didn’t serve to further illegality: Channing recalls that he was running with the other two guys, kicking garbage bins down the streets, when he thought it would be a smart idea to kick a window.
Funnily, he expected it not to break, but the window disappointed him by doing just that.
Elsewhere in the interview, Channing is being his usually charming self, voicing his gratitude at getting a proper shot in a profession where he once thought he’d never make it. Besides the drunken rages with Shia, he also recalls how petrified he was thinking he wouldn’t be able to prove to writer / director Dito Montiel that he was more than an Abercrombie model.
If you’ve been keeping track of his career, you know that he’s proved Montiel and the entire world that he can deliver solid acting performances. To many moviegoers and critics, Tatum is the biggest surprise in cinema of recent years.