Published in the December 2014 issue

Rainy night. At least part of the time.

A crab shack called the Crab Shack, on a coastal island in Georgia. The young waitress sets a plate of blue crabs and a ramekin of clarified butter on the table. And even though he surely knows that there are so many crabs in the world's restaurants now that a single steaming plate of them ought not feel like a high holy day, Channing Tatum treats the food like an arrival, rumbling up his enthusiasm. "Oh yeah," he says. "That's right. That's them, right there." Chan to his friends, thirty-four years old, his baseball hat turned backward, tilted, metallic sticker still plastered against the underside of the brim, emphasizes the words in a way in which every syllable is accented. That'sthem, right there. Boom-boom, boom-boom. Dance beat. A little trochaic resonance under the arching ceiling formed by an ancient tangle of live oaks. And Tatum— the first honest-to-God movie star of his generation, one half of Jump Street, the engine and inspiration of Magic Mike, and one of the stars of Foxcatcher, the new drama about freestyle wrestling and murder—curls his fingers, raises a fist like he might be blowing a little horn, and speaks into it in a fake shout-out: Blue crab in the Crab Shack. That is what it is all about. He sounds so happy, laughing at the little orgy of the moment: crabs, night, rain, Yankees game on a Dixie flatscreen above the bar. Jeter. At his end, with no one watching from these quarters. And none of that rain getting through the branches above. His eyes on the rough, steaming blue-green hides, which is to say eyes down. A joyous and conspiratorial gaze that says Crabs, motherfucker! Crabs!

"He eats about half of one chicken breast. With water. The stripper's diet. The wrestler's diet. Sore in muscle and bone, dizzy with hunger, all in service to the upcoming nakedness. It's not that bad, he says. It's what he's doing."

The waitress gives me a brief lesson on eating crab: "Don't eat the lungs. Pick a starting point, and don't put it down until you get what you wanted."Then, with two little turns of the plate, the waitress orients all of them—eight, maybe nine crabs—facing me. They are mine. In front of Tatum, she places a single chicken breast, with the skin still on. He tugs at that skin, disappointed: He ordered it skinless. The waitress fills his water and asks, Barbecue sauce, maybe? "No, no," he says, voice sunk, eyes down. "This is really fine. I'm like T-minus I-don't-know-what to being naked all the time." The sequel to Magic Mike starts shooting here, in Savannah, within a week, and he's dieting and working out like mad to cut the last little bit of weight that a thirty-four-year-old might reasonably carry naturally. "It's…what I'm doing," he says to her of the impending nakedness. "It's what I do." He squints, then green-eyes her a bit from under his brow so that she gets it.

And right there, Tatum purses his lips and nods. "Don't eat the lungs." And turning his fork in little wheel rotations in the air, speaking as if mainly to himself, he says: "You gotta make a plan." The waitress giggles. Everything he says delights her.

"I would like to join you," he says, gesturing to my plate. "I would like a beer. I would like to have some crab. I love eating. But this is what I'm doing right now." And so, without comment or complaint, he begins to pick at the back of his chicken breast, and with his cheek full of chicken meat, me cracking and forking, he storytells his rise from lost boy to exotic dancer to fashion model, from soft-drink commercials to movie franchises and an Oscar-worthy film in which he himself is Oscar-worthy. He rolls out his childhood in Mississippi, adolescence in Florida, twenties in California, stories of how he moved from one little mess of trouble to another. And in the span of his story, as I do my damage to these crabs, Tatum barely moves, his T-shirt and hoodie hanging on his bones, his stillness a rebuke to the awesome physicality that has fueled his ascent. He eats about half of one chicken breast. With water. The stripper's diet. The wrestler's diet. Sore in muscle and bone, dizzy with hunger, all in service to the upcoming nakedness. It's not that bad, he says. It's what he's doing.

PLUS: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Channing Tatum

Even in the early days in Pascagoula, he had size. He always heard people—other kids, their parents, his mother's friends—saying he was getting big, repeating it like a headline from a paper, because it was news: Chan Tatum's getting some size! And he thought a lot about speed—about not being fast enough to catch someone and also not being fast enough to get away if he needed to. His father, a former football player himself, worried openly about his speed. Football was big in their house. And so he'd run, place to place, one sports practice to another, building up speed. He thought better when he ran. It filled him up, gave him a feeling of being busy. Years later, when he'd ask his mom Was I a bad kid? she'd answer: You weren't bad, you were just…busy.

On the way to school in the morning, which he submitted to mostly out of consideration for his mother, Tatum allowed himself to entertain the idea of playing football in college. Especially at Alabama, where he was born and for whom he and his father always rooted. And once in school, he stared out the windows of the classroom, beyond the lawn, over the road. Work itself, the entire possibility and promise of it, was out there. For a time, he knew that his father was out there, over the tops of some houses, near some freeway, on the roof of a bungalow, resting his weight on the two-by he nailed down to hold himself, working, telling stories to the other men, pulling back the ancient ceiling of the unthinkably hot skin of another unimportant rooftop. But for now, behind the windows of his school, with its rules and painful quietude and everything smelling like shoes, farts, wet trees, he was sure of only one thing: School did not hold him. The diagnosis of ADHD did not hold him. The medication they gave him did not hold him. In the afternoons, free of school, he spent untold hours with his martial-arts instructor, a master, tracing shapes in the air until he could feel them notched into the outside of his arms. Until he could feel them without conscious thought. "It wasn't complicated," he remembers. "I learned to appreciate repetition. That's why I can dance. It's how I learned to act. I have a high tolerance for repetition. And for the first time in my life, I was busy enough that I didn't want to stop until I got it right. That never happened in school for me. Not once."

"In wrestling, there is no retreat. You advance and advance, and being tired is just a lie to make the other guy think he can relax. It's so hard, harder than anything I've ever done."

His family left Mississippi for Tampa when he was in his early teens, and Florida was not Mississippi: nothing to absorb the brightness, no shadows, really, no diesel cloud from the barges, no paper mill, no river. His mom worked for an airline as his dad recovered from a career-ending fall at work, and she drove him back to Mississippi regularly to finish his studies with his martial-arts master. The road, a hot asphalt crescent, eight hours each way, the two of them together, hauling up the Gulf Coast to Mississippi, all in order for him to stay busy. But eventually the drive became too much for her, and Tatum found himself alone in the afternoons in a normal house ("front yard, backyard, pool") in Tampa. With so many girls in shouting distance. Trouble. "It's the best city in America for fourteen-year-olds with parents who work," he says. "There was always some place to go, some house to go into, some alley to go down, roof to climb around, or fence to jump." On so many Saturdays after his games, while visiting girls—on front porches and street corners, in parks and bodegas, at bus stops and beaches—he found he still needed to move, so he learned to dance the same way he learned nearly everything else—by doing. "I wanted to dance," he says. "I just didn't know anything. Neither did the girls I was seeing. But their moms did. I figured out the fastest way for me to learn to dance was to grab up some abuela and get her moving on the porch." And Tatum, big as he was at fifteen, looking like a man, really, floated around in the soupy summer heat, the music getting turned up from inside, with all these women.

He kept his imagination engaged, stayed busy with his hips, swinging his way to exhaustion, repeating. It's how he got through football practice, and it's how he got into exotic dancing. Forced onstage during his first audition at a club in Tampa, he started in with what he never learned in school: observation, improvisation, athleticism, discipline, and repetition. That and, one imagines, some control over incipient sexual arousal. But this goes unsaid.

Foxcatcher, in theaters now, is based on a true story from the nineties that no one really remembers. Tatum uses his size and his most intense self, his darkest stare, to portray the pain of Mark Schultz, two-time Olympian, two-time world freestyle champion, who took to training for a rich man (played by a wonderfully weird Steve Carell) and his money. It is the best role Tatum's ever been offered and the best he's ever played. The director, Bennett Miller, offered it to him after watching the underrated 2006 drama A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, in which Tatum played a neighborhood bully in mid-1980s Queens: brutally loyal, equally brutalized, sweet, and violent. "I saw him in that," Miller says, "and immediately offered him the part in Foxcatcher, which was still years away. And in that time, Channing's career took him directions that moved him away from the thing that caught my eye. But it took about six years from the time I offered him the role to get the movie made, and in that time there was never anybody that I ever wanted for the part other than Channing."

THIS PAGE, PAGE 121, AND 124: SUIT, SHIRT, AND TIE BY ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA; SHOES BY JOHN LOBB; SOCKS BY GOLD TOE.

From the time he was officially cast in early 2012, Tatum learned to wrestle—single-legs, suplexes, head-and-arm throws. It was all new to him. "I no longer consider myself a practitioner of martial arts," he says. "But wrestling is nothing like that, anyway. In wrestling, there is no retreat. No way to slow things down. In wrestling, you advance and advance, and being tired is just a lie to make the other guy think he can relax. It's so hard, harder than anything I've ever done."

His costar and training partner, Mark Ruffalo, was a wrestler in high school, and they went through the ringer darkly together. (They also open the film with a choreographed warm-up ritual that is balletic in its precision and intimacy.) "No doubt there's an element of misery, and we felt that. But Channing is unrelenting and unyielding. He went right through. And he created that intensity with his eyes, his body, this presence."

"I'll tell you the truth," Tatum says of the man he plays in Foxcatcher. "He's even intense when he eats eggs."

To prepare, Tatum also studied with Schultz himself, training with him, eating with him. "I'll tell you the truth," Tatum says of the man he plays. "He's even intense when he eats eggs. He's still scary to get on the mats with. My third or fourth time wrestling, there I am with this technician of the sport, an all-time great, a really violent wrestler who can bend me in half pretty easily. He did, too. Crushed me."

Tatum adopted Schultz's damaged hop-along walk, his iron stare, the muscle-torn upper-body strength. "What I did was really work on imitating him, from his walk to his neck rolls. I tried to get myself to fit inside that. Everything in him looks a little shredded and like it hurts, but no one will ever know how much." (Imitation is something acting teachers often teach an actor to avoid in the characterization of real people, but then Tatum never bothered much with acting lessons.) This is the Channing Tatum way: He teaches himself, gains weight, gains muscle. When his wife, Jenna Dewan Tatum, visited him on location outside Pittsburgh, with its western Pennsylvania rain and the inky, dark maleness of the wounded souls pulling each other by the collar, the ankle, the knee, she knew it was no place to stick around. "I'm doing you no good here," she told Tatum, who has loved her since they met during the making of his first dance movie—Step Up—eight years ago. Then she left and Tatum was alone again, inside the part.

When Tatum says "School didn't hold me," people hear "I couldn't do it," but that's not why he left a little college in West Virginia toward the end of his freshmen year, after missing out on a football scholarship to Wake Forest because of academic reasons. "I had no plan with football," he says. "No commitment. I don't think I even loved the sport anymore, and my mind was never on classes. I needed to reset myself." He moved back to Tampa, then eventually out to L. A. without a plan, without any obvious route or goal. No degree or acting experience. "I didn't do much when I first got there. I was a roofer for a while. It was mostly long days and hours, and hours at night spent in dance clubs. I mostly learned to dance by hanging out in clubs and grinding on girls. Women, cars, alleys. Fun one night, then ugly, too. Then I started modeling. And the travel schedule, the food, the demands brought things together for me. That was a full day, with expectations every day. I'd never had that. Suddenly, every hour of the day was accounted for. Busy. And I never want to be without that again."

Abercrombie and American Eagle, Armani and Dolce & Gabbana: Modeling, a career that has brutalized so many actors before they crossed over, ended up stabilizing his life and opening doors. "I met people, made contacts," he says, "and started to be taken more seriously." He moved into commercials and began auditioning for roles in movies that played to his type—jocks, dancers, rebels, soldiers, bullies, crushes—and soon there were offers, small parts first, like a high school basketball player in Coach Carter, with Samuel L. Jackson, in 2005. And by his fourth movie (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints) or his twelfth movie (G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra) or his twenty-first (Magic Mike), people started walking out of theaters saying, That guy.That guy is smarter than I thought. That guy is pretty cool. Charming. Funny. Hot. They liked his looks. His looks would always matter, even when it was about his size, his speed. No one much debated his looks, so he came to forget them. And it happens years later that Tatum—trouble as a kid, trouble as a teenager, trouble as a college dropout—becomes a movie star like Steve McQueen, only nice. A guy without a plan, groomed by no one to do anything, except work. And work some more. He makes action movies bearable, comedies sharper. And even if, as Bennett Miller says, Step Up and G.I. Joe moved him away from the kind of critical validation that says he can really act, Foxcatcher is a correction, the breakaway moment, a role crafted by mingling brooding silence and the metered physical explosion of anger and sport. And maybe he won't win any awards for it, but that does not mean he shouldn't.

Back at the Crab Shack.

Tatum, in his many parts—star, cowriter, part-time choreographer, producer of Magic Mike XXL—describes the long days that make up his life at the moment: rewriting the final draft with his writing partner every morning. Taking his fifteen-month-old daughter for shell hunts before dinner. Dance rehearsals twice a day, "once by myself and once with the group." And what are those like, naked dance rehearsals? He grins: "There are a lot of apologies. A lot of 'I'm sorry that ran into your chin' and 'Let me take my thigh off your neck.' "

The rewriting continues just a few days before the shoot begins.

"When we sit down, we're really writing," he says. "My partner and I make wholesale changes. As needed. Today, tomorrow. That's why I'm the producer, too. So we have permission to screw up the whole thing every day."

"We write to the very last second," says Reid Carolin, Tatum's writing partner. "We read the script aloud, we retool scenes. Chan delivers the changes to the director and the cinematographer, works them out again. Then he goes into the gym to work out and I get my laptop, sit on the heavy equipment, and we start working more while he's lifting."

"I've got a complication for you," I say, in the way of a story pitch. "What about a male stripper who's really worried about a small penis? Would that be a good complication?"

Tatum laughs. "Yeah. Actually, no."

"But it seems like it would be a real-world problem."

He stops then, clears his throat, and does the thing where he slides his chin forward as if he were speaking to someone in authority: "I don't think a person in that position would be attracted to the life of a stripper." But he is the authority, not me, so I listen.

And in listening, I hear his stories, his history, his adventures. He likes everywhere he's ever been—every phase, every fad, every quirk of life in the fringes of large American cities. He makes being a latchkey kid in lower-middle-class Tampa sound like a picaresque novel. He makes dancing, basically naked, basically solely for the hooting pleasure of a drunken ever-changing horde of dollar-bill-toting MILFs, sound like Saturday Night Fever. And while I'm listening, I grab my last crab end-to-end and split it with one hand. It crumbles a little, then snaps open and sprays Tatum with a spritz of crab juice straight in his million-dollar philtrum, lips and all. It's like, "One day Ruffalo and I decided to cut as much weight as we could, like these guys do, and we're riding bikes, and…" and splat, sprayed with crab boil. To the credit of his everlasting graciousness, Tatum plays it off, pretends he doesn't notice. He blinks one time to register something. A reset, the merest of pauses, barely registering before he continues: "…running, jumping rope, in and out of the saunas."

He keeps on. He is so willing to bear with discomfort, so decent as to not make the moment larger than it is, and why not say it, so nice that he wants me to pretend with him that I didn't just slime him. I have to interrupt him. "Hey," I tell him. "I don't care how polite you are. I just hit you with crab. That was terrible. I'm really sorry."

He breathes out and laughs. He knocks a little piece of shell off his eyebrow. "This happens with crab," he says, wiping his face. And then he works up a one-liner, so this can be laughed off: "It's all right. At least I got some crab." Then he tries again: "Or at least I got a taste." He's cool with it, so I stop my cringing and Tatum picks up where he left off, he and Ruffalo torturing themselves a little in order to believe more in what they do. There he is again: Channing Tatum, crouched over and hungry on the edge of the dark Atlantic Ocean, rewriting his work and himself to the very last.

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