Channing Tatum: Dad Never Knew I Was a Stripper Until Interview on Ellen Degeneres

Channing Tatum’s star has been on the rise for a while now. The star has now three-peated the feat of having back-to-back $100 million dollar films (The Vow, 21 Jump Street, Magic Mike). He gets ove...
Channing Tatum: Dad Never Knew I Was a Stripper Until Interview on Ellen Degeneres
Written by Mike Tuttle

Channing Tatum’s star has been on the rise for a while now. The star has now three-peated the feat of having back-to-back $100 million dollar films (The Vow, 21 Jump Street, Magic Mike). He gets over $10 million per film himself now.

He has been married for five years, He and wife Jenna have a daughter, Everly. They are part of Tatum’s drive.

“There’s not enough hours in the day,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “I can’t schedule my life and give my daughter all the time that I want to give her and also my wife and all the creative stuff. You can’t really physically be fully present — mentally, spiritually. And that’s my struggle: putting things in perspective [and] being there for everything.”

Even with a string of films under his belt, if you ask most people to tell you one thing about Channing Tatum, they will mention that he was a stripper back in his college days, going under the stage name “Chan Crawford.” He talks about that period of his life like he was a different person. He says he never really made much money at it.

“Not as much as you think,” he says. “On a good night, 150 bucks. On a bad night, 70 bucks — even 50 at times.”

Contrary to some tabloid reports, Tatum insists that he was not a junkie during his “stripper years.”

“I wouldn’t say I was losing myself in drugs because I wasn’t doing anything habitually,” he says. “Just experimenting. Experimenting, I would say. Never the big ones — crack or heroin. I never OD’d or anything. Never. Maybe [cocaine] a couple times, but that was later. Drinking was probably the biggest [thing]. I didn’t look at drinking as a problem. It wasn’t at that point, and I still don’t think it’s a problem. But at that time in my life, it was, ‘Let’s go out and have a great time.'”

Tatum’s parents are known to be very supportive of their son, showing up at film shoots and premieres. But Tatum says his own father did not know that he had worked as a stripper until he saw Channing talk about it with Ellen Degeneres on her show.

“We were walking together, and my dad said: ‘Why? You didn’t need the money. We always provided,’“ recalls Tatum. “It broke my heart. I told him it had nothing to do with him. ‘That was my road. That was the road I had to take.'”

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