Magic Mike XXL star Channing Tatum has done hundreds of interviews, but he’ll likely never forget the day he met Toronto’s Carly Fleischmann.

Fleischmann, a budding 21-year-old talk-show host is autistic and non-verbal. She interviewed Tatum for the premiere episode of her YouTube series Speechless with Carly Fleischmann, using questions she pre-wrote and delivered via a speech program on her iPad.

It has garnered more than 2.3 million views since it was posted April 29 and the story about Fleischmann’s cheekily hilarious and disarming interview — that often had Tatum breaking up with laughter — has been picked up by the likes of U.S. Weekly, People.com, German magazine Stern, Glamour.com, Britain’s Daily Mail and Today.

“(Celebrity blogger) Perez Hilton emailed her to say ‘you have magic,’” said Carly’s dad, Toronto ad executive Arthur Fleischmann.

“I would like to introduce you to my first guest ever,” Fleischmann begins. “He has been a stripper, a police officer, a secret agent, a reporter, a boyfriend to many and soon he will dump his wife to be with me.”

Tatum barely recovers before she asks if he would date someone with autism. When he says he’d need permission from his wife, Jenna Dewan Tatum, Fleischmann taps her iPad screen and the electronic voice quips: “All right, I’ve got my lawyers working on your divorce papers as we speak.”

Her guileless approach can’t help but draw a subject out and Tatum was clearly amused by her fresh, unfiltered style.

In between they discuss who he’d like to work with (Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson), how many girls he took home each night in his stripping days (some nights more than others) and whether he and his wife ever engage in dirty dancing outside the bedroom (they do).

Fleischmann has previously worked on an award-winning interactive video about living with autism, Carly’s Café as well as a book written by her father, Carly’s Voice: Breaking Through Autism (Simon & Schuster Canada).

Fleischmann was down with a bout of flu Friday and not able to comment, but her father said she’d always had an eye on a career in journalism and more recently, talk-show host. After she met an associate of Tatum’s while making Carly’s Café she kept in touch and later arranged the interview through him. “She did this all on her own,” said her proud dad.

Fleischmann’s family paid for the trip to Los Angeles last month, with her dad calling in a few favours to get a camera operator and location for the one-hour shoot. His ad agency, John St., provided the editing.

“This first instalment was a test to see if it was something she enjoyed doing and was capable of doing,” Fleischmann said. “She’s hoping she can connect with a Netflix or someone who might be interested in helping her.”

Carly was diagnosed with autism at age 2 and it was believed she would never communicate. But after years of work with therapists, she began to tentatively type words on a keyboard.

Her dad, who admits her “wit is quite disarming,” said the first thing Carly did in laying out her Tatum questions was to write the jokes. Then she wrote six main questions with two follow-ups each.

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“She’s able to use her condition to her benefit,” he said, adding her outward anxiety and admitted nervousness makes people warm to her instantly. ‘People tell her things … she makes herself vulnerable.”

Aside from helping his daughter realize a long-held dream, the best part of all the attention following the first Speechless episode is that it focuses on her skill as an interviewer.

“It warms my heart that most of the (online) commenting is less about her autism and more about her journalism finesse,” said Fleischmann.