I’m not sure why I keep writing about our most charming of potatoes, Channing Tatum. I mean, he’s still talking, but we’re way past the moment in time when Channing would let loose in interviews, when he would get liquored up with a magazine journalist and make some city boy or girl camp out in the backwoods of Alabama. The 2014 version of Channing is more professional, more buttoned down, more on-message. And it’s not as interesting, frankly. But I still like him and I still think he’s going to get nominated for an Oscar for Foxcatcher, so let’s just accept him as he is now. As Esquire says, Charming Potato is “the first honest-to-God movie star of his generation.” Go here to read the Esquire piece – it’s not as overwritten as most Esquire profiles, but there’s a lot of filler in there. Some highlights:

He’s on a crazy diet for Magic Mike XXL: “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.” 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.

He did martial arts as a kid when he was diagnosed as ADHD: “It wasn’t complicated. 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.”

Being 14 years old in Tampa: “It’s the best city in America for fourteen-year-olds with parents who work. 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.”

Learning how to dance when he was 14: 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.”

[From Esquire]

He’s used variations on that “abuela” (grandmother) line in other interviews and it cracks me up every time. Just the idea of a then-teenage Channing begging all of the older Hispanic ladies of Tampa to teach him how to dance… it’s perfect. It’s classic Charming Potato.

The rest of the piece is about Foxcatcher and Channing says outright that he was looking to mimic real Mark Shultz, the man he portrays in Foxcatcher. Channing and Mark Ruffalo both trained with Shultz and Channing talks about how he wanted to get Shultz’s movements down perfectly. Which actors usually don’t admit – they don’t come outright and say “I’m mimicking this person,” they try to fancy it up. But not Channing!

Photos courtesy of Esquire.