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-yearold daughter, Everly [mom is Jenna Dewan], is hot o 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.

How much are you like the dad in the book? Do you wear boas and glittery clothes? 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 say I would do it anyway, but I deHnitely 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.

Do you feel the need to do it before she outgrows it? I was sitting with her at dinner the last few days and 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 o 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? 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 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 di erent and o er up a di erent 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 of my English teachers that remember 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.”

Are you planning to turn Sparkella into a Hlm. How will that work? It’ll be Sparkella and her dad, but we’re going to 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 fantasti

cal but you’re still looking at real people doinê real stu

Have you hung up your Magic Mike dancing shoes for good? 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 di erent ways that people act. 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, êo êet in a Hêht, 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.

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.”

Are Pussy Island and Project Artemis next? Zoë Kravitz is directing Pussy Island and I think she’s just coming to the end of the edit, and 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.