Channing Tatum talks on ‘Tonight Show’ about growing up on MS Coast. Here’s what he said
Channing Tatum is on “The Tonight Show” promoting his new movie being released today when he tells host Jimmy Fallon about how he went from tossing cards with his friends in his living room in South Mississippi to become a movie star.
The show aired Aug. 12, and Fallon asked the actor about his cameo in the recently released Marvel movie “Deadpool & Wolverine.”
“You play Gambit and you were unbelievable dude,” Fallon says. “It was the best,” he said, and repeated the compliment.
Tatum said he could cry and get really emotional, since he actively was working in the industry for 20 years to play that character.
At that point, he brought up how he started life as an ordinary kid, growing up in small town Mississippi.
“I don’t know — in third grade, throwing playing cards at my friends in, like the living room,” Tatum recalls.
“Really?” Fallon asks.
Tatum said his dad is from Metairie in New Orleans, “And I grew up in Pascagoula/Gautier, Mississippi.” It was all around the bayou, he said.
Asked if that is how he got his accent, Tatum said people don’t know that there aren’t a lot of Cajuns in New Orleans, but the sound sort of “marinates all around down there,” he said.
In a previous interview, Tatum said he lived in the Pascagoula-Gautier area from about first grade to fifth grade. His sister Paige attended Gautier Junior High and his parents, Glenn and Kay Tatum, owned 2-fer’s, a two-for-one pizza shop on Gautier-Vancleave Road.
The “Deadpool & Wolverine” movie almost wasn’t made, he said, as it floundered for years between studios.
Actor Ryan Reynolds, took Gambit out of the grave, Tatum said, and truly made the movie happen.
Tatum was on The Tonight Show in July and talked about how Taylor Swift went from making homemade pop tarts to stepping out in her Eras Tour. “I was a fan of the music but I did not know that she was like such an unstoppable force,” he said.
He also talked about his fiance Zoë Kravitz, daughter of Lenny Kravitz, who wrote and directed the psychological thriller “Blink Twice.”
Channing Tatum — his real name — has returned to South Mississippi now and again. In 2014, he was helping open Buoy’s Bar, owned by his bodyguard Roger Caplinger, in Bay St. Louis and he stopped by the Hancock County Sheriff’s office to say hi to the staff.
This story was originally published August 23, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
