Channing Tatum Just Wrote a Children’s Book, and It’s the Most Wholesome Thing You'll Read All Year
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Everly Tatum was a night-time terror, though not when she slept. When she slept, she slept like a princess, 12 hours a night, surely to the envy of every parent in every kingdom and every land. But to get Everly to sleep—this was the trial. One night, one of the early nights when Channing Tatum became a single father and he and Everly were alone in the house and once again Everly could not fall asleep, he sat down by the door in her room. He was worried. He was worried that things had changed, that he wouldn’t be able to connect with Everly in the way she needed. He could barely put her to sleep. And so, he sat there.
“I’m a thick neck jock from the south, grew up in the woods, you know, jumping over rattlesnakes while running down a trail,” Tatum says. “I had no idea how to raise a daughter in L.A. and be a girl dad.”
Tatum has recently moved into a new home, smaller, “cabin-like,” tucked into the canyons outside L.A. He’s spending the afternoon playing with Everly, who is now almost 8. From his backyard, his Dutch Shepard “Rook” wanders occasionally into the Zoom frame. It’s been almost four years since Tatum appeared in a Hollywood production. During that time, he’s been working on a passion project, his directorial debut alongside partner Reid Carolin, Dog—Tatum’s hardest role yet, he’s previously said. Those same years also saw an amicable separation between Tatum and Jenna Dewan, Tatum’s co-star on Step Up, where the two met and first started dating; they married in 2009. It’s been a half decade of professional and emotional trial. And that was before the world shut down.
Tatum spent quarantine part-time with Everly in Ojai, California, and part-time in L.A., where he started writing. The work, The One and Only Sparkella, is now a children’s book illustrated by Kim Barnes. The story features a young girl and her father and the perils of self-expression at school. Though the inspiration was Everly, those perils weren’t foreign topics to Tatum, who stuttered as a child, struggled in class with ADD and dyslexia, and was picked on during his first years in high school. “Because I sparkle,” the self-affirming refrain of the book, is thrown into doubt by teasing classmates and later re-affirmed and owned—both by father and daughter—in the form of glitter and dancing.
“There’s no playbook,” Tatum says, of fathering a girl. “So I just tried to connect to her by just going into her world and doing whatever it is that she does.” That meant hair braiding, blindfolded makeup sessions, and more than one Channing-sized Halloween unicorn onesie. When it came to the nighttime trial those years ago, it turned out going into her world was as simple as sitting down in her room. “I just sat at the door. I didn’t lay down and have a nap. I was like, Hey, I’m here. I’m here. We’re gonna get through this. And she felt really taken care of, that I was gonna be there until she fell asleep. It was a strange moment where I was like, Okay, I can do this. I got this.”
Tatum sat down with Men’s Health to chat about the dad things he’s figured out and the dad things he’s still improving on, which includes—no kidding—dancing.
Men's Health: On Instagram, you wrote how you accidentally locked yourself in your daughter’s room during quarantine … and then this book began?
Channing Tatum: I would go into her room and look around [to get ideas]. [Laughing] I definitely didn’t lock myself in there. One of the inciting things [for the story] was an outfit moment—when she was really really young. It must have been the first or second week of preschool. She was probably four or five. She had a pair of leopard-print high tops that she wore 'til they had holes in them. And she had this cape thing that when you held your arms out in it, you look like a slice of watermelon. She just thought it was the funniest thing in the world.
We’re getting ready to go to school and right before we leave, she realizes what she has on. And she kind of panics and starts taking it off. She’s like, “I can’t wear this. I don't want to get laughed at.” And it just broke my heart, because she never before cared that people were looking. That was the first time I saw her be self-conscious and it shattered my heart. But also, it was a really proud moment of going, “Okay, we all have to go through this; you’re gonna have to go out in the world and figure this out.” And she did. Still today, she wears the craziest stuff.
Your own father sounds like he may have kept to stricter gender roles when it came to play. Would he ever dance with you and your sister or braid hair?
Yeah, my dad wasn’t a hair braider. I don’t think that was ever in the cards there. I mean, my dad was a typical strict Southern dad. You got whippings when you did bad things. He taught me and my sister how to fight. [Laughing] It wasn’t like, “Here, come back here and let’s play whatever game.”
Where did your [parenting] instincts come from?
I really just followed Evie. She’s been an incredible teacher. Evie taught me how to listen. Taught me how to keep an intention. [Kids] are masters at getting what they want. To be able to hold an intention with love—I don’t even think I could do that with myself before I had a kid. When I was expressing my anxiety about having kids, somebody told me, “Hey, man, relax, they come out pretty much how they’re gonna be. You’re not going to mess her up. Just love her and you’re going to be fine.” Or … “You’re definitely going to mess her up, [laughing] but you’re going to do your best and that’s all you’re gonna do anyway.”
The trope of Dad Embarrassing Daughter While Dropping Her Off at School is very real in this book. Is there an embarrassing drop off Everly won’t forget?
Yeah, but it was probably the opposite! The dreaded kindergarten drop-off for us was: she didn’t want us to leave. And she’s since made me promise—and I know it’s gonna come back to bite her—that all throughout school I will walk her in. I know at some point she’s gonna be like, “Dad, can you not walk me in?” And I’m gonna be like, “No, no, we had a deal.”
One of her first weeks, I made this other deal with her. There’s a trick during drop off when you say, “You better not push me out.” Reverse psychology. And so, I was like, “Alright, I’ll do 10 push-ups, Evie. And that’s gonna be really embarrassing for me, but then you have to push me out.” And she’s like, “… 20 push-ups.” And I was like, “… fine.” We get there, I drop down in front of all the parents, all the kids, and I do 20 push-ups, and everyone’s counting them. It was very embarrassing. And then Evie pushed me out. It’s never really gotten to the place of her actually pushing me out. If I could sit through school with her the entire day, she would love it.
In the book, dancing is a really important expression of personality and comfort—this safe space between dad and daughter. To the dads who don’t dance, what’s your advice for loosening up? What lesson are you teaching first in Channing Tatum’s Dad Dancing Class?
It’s really tough to dance badly sometimes—to not dance on beat or be weird. She didn’t care if I was dancing cool. She didn’t know what cool was. She just wanted to see me fall down. If you can’t dance, dance more. They’re probably going to love it even more than if you could dance. So just send it. Go full out. Put on whatever your favorite song is and go bonkers. Because you’ll probably shock your kid so much that it will be one of their favorite moments. Like, “Woah, what is dad doing? Dad doesn’t dance! That’s not what dad does.” And it will be huge.
I noticed a small smiling pink poop emoji hidden on your character’s jacket—were there artistic easter eggs that you asked Kim [Barnes] to draw?
It was the poop emoji. Good eye. I love the Berenstain Bears where there’s always this weird little character on every page, which is never really addressed. I kind of wanted to do that with the poop emoji. Because, of course, Evie and mom, they’re like fairies. And I’m like a “poopy snail.” So, I’m like, “Fine you’re a glitter poop.” She’s like, “I’m not a glitter poop.” I'm like, “Well if I’m a poopy snail, then you’re a glitter poop.” That that’s where that came from.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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