Channing Tatum opened up about how he felt that he’d tell his daughter Everly about his past experiences as a stripper when he can show her the Magic Mike movies when she’s older in a new interview with Entertainment Tonight. While the actor’s nine-year-old is still too young to see the Magic Mike trilogy, Channing, 42, said that he’d talk to her about it when she does finally see the movies. “When she’s old enough to watch them, we’ll have that conversation,” he told the outlet.
Channing also gave a short re-enactment of how the conversation might go, but he admitted that he wanted to be honest with her. “There’s no version of me not having the conversation of ‘Dad didn’t just do them in movies, I was an actual stripper,’ so I’m not gonna lie to her,” he said, as he spoke alongside his Magic Mike’s Last Dance co-star Salma Hayek.
Channing shares his daughter Everly with his ex-wife Jenna Dewan, who he was married to from 2009 to 2019. The Magic Mike star has been dating actress and director Zoe Kravitz since 2021.
The actor’s experiences as a stripper were the inspiration for his hugely popular Magic Mike movies. Channing first admitted that he had been an exotic dancer in a 2010 interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, where he first mentioned wanting to make a movie about the experience. “I did it for almost a year. I’ve lived a crazy life, for sure,” he said at the time. “It seemed like a fun thing to do at the time and I got out unscathed. It’s nothing I’m ashamed of and I’m not proud of it either. I wanted to talk about it in the beginning of my career but my publicist wouldn’t let me.”
While the Magic Mike movies may be directly inspired by his past job, it’s not the first time that he’s put his dancing skills to use in a movie. While he’s known for playing a variety of action heroes, like in G.I. Joe, and comedic parts, like 21 Jump Street, Channing’s early on-screen roles were in music videos, including Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” video. He was also the star of the popular dance hit Step Up.
Aside from the movies, Channing has occasionally shown off his dancing skills on his social media, like when he shared a clip of himself busting a move on Instagram, back in October 2021. With three Magic Mike movies under his belt, Salma revealed that her co-star’s skills have gotten much better in an August interview with People. “If you thought he could dance [before], you are going to realize you haven’t seen anything,” she told the outlet.