How Channing Tatum Went From Stripper to Bestselling Author

Channing Tatum, The Magic Mike and The Lost City star, 43, became a New York Times bestselling author with the release of the children’s picture book, The One and Only Sparkella, in 2021. The One and Only Sparkella Makes a Plan followed, and now a third father-daughter adventure story, inspired by his 10-year-old daughter, Everly [mom is Jenna Dewan], is hot off the presses. Tatum talked with Parade about The One and Only Sparkella and The Big Lie and how much he loves being a hands-on dad.

Related: 'Magic Mike' Star Channing Tatum’s Net Worth In 2023 Is XXL Indeed

Scott: Everly was the inspiration for these books, but how much are you like the dad in the book? Do you wear boas and glittery clothes? 

Tatum: Oh, yeah. We just went to a Renaissance fair on Sunday, and I was in a Merlin-like robe and wearing horns, so I'm still playing dress-up every day. I'm always getting my face painted, my nails painted, or something like that.

Is that so you can enter Everly’s world or is that something that you would do as Channing? 

It depends on who you ask. A lot of my friends would probably say I would do it anyway, but I definitely look at it as like, “Oh, we're playing together, and this is how we play.” We like dressing up. We like feeling the whole thing, just being free and wherever that takes us. Evy, my daughter, is so incredibly creative. We like anything that looks cool and weird and new and that we have never seen before.

Related: He's a Proud Girl Dad! Everything You Need to Know About Channing Tatum as a Father

And you need to do it before she outgrows it. 

I was sitting with her at dinner the last few days and I was like, It’s going to be a moment and I'm going to die a thousand deaths in this little moment that she’s not going to want to hang out with me all the time. I told her, “Right now, you want to hang out with me so much, but there's going to be a moment where you’re, ‘Can you just drop us off at the mall and come back in a couple hours?”’ That is going to be really hard for me.

These books are meant for adults to read to children. Do you think there’s a message in the stories for adults as well? 

I think you'll find [adult messages] in there. They're not answers or lessons or anything, they're just possibilities if it resonates with you. Some parents have no problem playing and being silly with their kids and some do. I started noticing that there aren’t any dad-daughter books. It was something that I hadn't seen before that I know I would have liked. If it was a dad book, it was like the incompetent dads aren't as good as moms or something. They can't cook breakfast or do hair. We can't do anything responsible, and the moms are always so responsible that they're no fun. I was like, “I just want to make something different and offer up a different perspective on the dad.”

Did you ever imagine in your wildest dreams that you would have “New York Times bestselling author” by your name? 

I can guarantee—I would bet my entire bank account—that you could go to any one of my English teachers that remembers me, and if you ask them, “Do you think that this kid in your class from so many years ago would have even been published, much less a New York Times bestseller, they would unequivocally, absolutely, say no. They would be, “I'm shocked that he can even put together a complete sentence.”

The Sparkella website says you are planning to turn this into a film. How will that work? 

It'll be Sparkella and her dad, but we're going to expand the world. Maybe very much expand the world. Some of my favorite movies are Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Honey I Shrunk the Kids. So many kids’ movies are animated now. I want to try to do something a little more old school in the realm of real people and a fantastical world like Labyrinth or The NeverEnding Story; things that feel so fantastical but you're still looking at real people doing real stuff movies.

Have you hung up your Magic Mike dancing shoes for good? Is Magic Mike’s Last Dance really the last dance? 

The only one I joke about is when I'm 70, I'll do Grumpy Old Strippers, like septuagenarian strippers or something. I don't know. I'm definitely tired of being Magic Mike. I want to move on. I'll let somebody reboot it.

Is it taking something from your life to make art—that authenticity—that make projects like Sparkella and Magic Mike successful? 

Sometimes people ask me, “What should I do to become an actor?” There's a lot of different ways that people act. There are tons of different methodologies and styles and I always say, “Go live a life. You’ve got to go to class, you’ve got to learn technique, you’ve got to learn how to act, but after that the most important thing is going and actually living some life. Go fall in love, go get your heart broken, go get in a fight, know what these things are really like. Know what the struggle of life really is.” I learned a lot from movies, but I learned a lot from the real world. I've had a very full life I would say. I think that pulling from… it's not just authenticity, it's your truth. I think you can read a beautiful novel like The Grapes of Wrath, and you can extrapolate what their truths were in that, but if you just try to take that truth and then tell a story with it, it's a copy of a copy. It’s like xeroxing. Then it has this watered-down effect in my opinion, but when it’s your truth, it's original and can be brighter and clearer.

Is there a type of role you’d like to play that hasn’t been offered to you yet? 

No, not really. I've done a pretty wide spectrum of characters. I really like for roles to come organically. I don't like to be, “Go look for a cowboy.” Or “I want to play a 1960s grifter.” That feels like we're trying to back into something instead of going, “Oh, this is really good.”

I’ve read Pussy Island and Project Artemis are next for you. Are either of those about to come out? 

Neither one is coming out this year, I believe, unless something crazy happens. Zoë Kravitz is directing Pussy Island and I think she’s just coming towards the end of the edit and going into color and sound, and then we’ll preview it and find a good date for it next year.

Artemis is a pretty big movie. It has a lot of special effects. It’s about the 1969 [moon] landing and NASA at that time. Me and [costar] Scarlett Johansson have a really fun relationship. We have a good thing. Me and her, we’re like buddies.

Is that frustrating for you because you want to see your work out there? 

You know, I've been doing this long enough that I really do almost forget about the movies after I do them. I'm just like, “Alright, moving on to the next thing.” Unless I'm producing or directing them, I put them out of mind, out of sight and focus on the next job or focus on developing whatever we’ve got coming up. I'm definitely ready to be done with Pussy Island. We've been working on that one pretty hard for a long time now and Zoë has killed herself for the movie, so I'm really proud of it and I’m ready for people to see it.

Tell us a little bit about how Sparkella came to be. 

The first one…I didn't even mean for it to be a book. I was talking to a literary agent at CAA, she had a kid, and I had a kid, and I was just sharing a story, and she's like, “You know that's a children's book, right?” I was like, “What do you mean?” She's like, “I’m going to send you something tomorrow.” She took the story that I told her and put it in a format. She said, “I don't think this is the exact book, but I think this is in the world of something you should look at here.” It wasn’t Sparkella. It was just this experience that I had with my daughter being self-conscious for the very first time. She's so flamboyant with costumes and things and I witnessed the very first time that she didn't want to wear something because she didn't know if the kids would make fun of her. It broke my heart because I saw my child change in front of me for the very first time, so that's what that one was [about]; the nervousness and the anxiety of expectations and the things come along with that.

The second book was [based on] another experience that I had with her. We were going to make a birdhouse and she had this whole plan of how she wanted it to look, how she wanted to make it. We didn't have any of the things that she wanted to make it with. The wood that she was trying to use was firewood. It wasn't planks of wood or anything, and I was trying to explain to her this isn't going to work. We can't even push this together into a house much less hang it in a tree for a bird. It took her so long to let go of this thing that she designed and that she was so excited about. Then, when she freed herself up to think about what it could be with the stuff that we had, it actually turned out to be better than what she designed in the first place. She was so happy with it.

I didn’t really know what to do for the third book. Cody Horn, my partner in this Sparkella venture, has a friend that's a teacher and she said around [age] five, kids are really experimenting with lying. We were like, “Huh, that's interesting.” Immediately I remembered a story of a time when I’d put Evy down to go to bed for the night and she called me back in and she's in tears. She said, “I can't tell you. You're going to be mad. You're going to call the cops.” I was, like, “What? Please tell me what it is.” She was, like, “Promise you won’t be mad.” I said, “I won’t be mad at you.” She told me she had stolen a toy car from school, and she didn't know what to do. She didn't know if she should take it back or whatever. And then she took something from a friend of hers and didn't even mean to steal it. She just picked it up and then she didn't know how to give it back to her because she didn't want her to think she took it. She was just spinning. It was eating her up inside. Then after she told me, I could see her visibly get better and the weight was less heavy. Truth is a is a big one, I think, for kids and for adults as well.

The One and Only Sparkella and the Big Lie is out now.

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