Seemingly force-fed into sailors’ whites, Channing Tatum’s first appearance in a Coen brothers film has already triggered dropped jaws across the world. Tip-tapping his way across the screen, Tatum makes good use of his dance skills as the star of an On-the-Town-ish film-within-a-film, one of several that punctuate Hail, Caesar!, which is set mostly within the confines of a single Hollywood studio in the early 1950s. The homoerotic subtext is never far from the surface of Tatum’s scenes, and Hail, Caesar! gets lots of yuks out of it.
“People now can’t believe it,” says Tatum. “The 50s were very square and conservative, but audiences loved these guys. The dancing is so elegant and dainty, but guys on the street would love it without irony. It’s such a fascinating juxtaposition that 50s men could like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. All that “I’m gonna dance with you, pal” type stuff.”
Casting Tatum was bit of a masterstroke on the Coens’ part, in keeping with their tradition of big-name cameos. But Tatum is something of a conundrum: he may look like a jock, but his willingness to hoof it up on film – from Step Up to Magic Mike – has been instrumental to his success. “There’s not a lot of actors that dance, I guess,” he says, “though I have never actually danced like this. When we started, the Coens weren’t sure if they wanted it to be tap dancing, but they did know they wanted it to be Gene Kelly-esque and athletic. Originally, it was going to be on a battleship, with me running up the sides, me on a big huge gun. But then it started to change to a tap dancing and singing thing. That I was really panicked about, but it worked out OK.”
Tatum is a highly rated actor these days, thanks to an astute association with a string of auteurish American directors alongside his more obviously commercial romcoms and action movies. He has made three films with Steven Soderbergh (Magic Mike, Haywire, Side Effects), Foxcatcher for Bennett Miller, Jupiter Ascending with the Wachowskis and, most recently, The Hateful Eight with Quentin Tarantino.
“I’ve been really blessed to work with so many different types of director. It’s fascinating. The way the Coens work is really precise, and they really try to bring you into the process. We get pages every morning, and on the back is the entire storyboard for the scene. But, within that, you can try anything, they don’t lead you that way. With Quentin, he’ll give you a note that is so specific: I want you to pick this up on the first syllable, I want you to walk all the way across the room, set it down, then say the last syllable. It’s just different styles. Everyone has their way.”
• Hail, Caesar! is released in the UK on 4 March.
