Channing Tatum wants to expose a couple things about his male stripper movie, Magic Make, which opens itself up to audiences starting June 29.
The film, directed by his Haywire buddy Steven Soderbergh, is mostly a fictional story about the edgy lives of male strippers.
What are the autobiographical bits in the film? Tatum, in fact, was a stripper, at 18, for nearly a year. He did live with his sister in Tampa, Fla., after dropping out of college, during that period.
And he did dress up as Marilyn Monroe once. Wait, what? “I did it as joke for a friend at his birthday party,” says Tatum, promoting Magic Mike in L. A. recently.
So, why is Tatum doing this fiction-versus-fact breakdown? For a while now, two of his former stripper associates from Tampa have been suggesting the actor used parts of their stories for his movie.
“There’s not one character I took from my real-life experiences,” says Tatum. “This is just the world we went into from a fictional place.”
If anything, the actor reports, the Magic Mike narrative is a great deal more appealing than “the dark world” he remembers submerging himself into.
Despite the constant pestering from folks from his past, Tatum shrugs off the insinuations.
“Those guys have been trying to make money off of me since I got into this business,” he says.
“They’re interesting people. I don’t want to say anything bad about them because they are part of the reason why I think this world is so interesting. They are intriguing and bizarre people.”