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"FacebookPinterest\n\n\"Hey, it's Chan. I'm at the bar.\"\n\nI'm not expecting a cell-phone message from Channing Tatum when I land in Montgomery, Alabama, on a sweet day in June. The plan was to hook up at his uncle Bruce's ranch, forty-five minutes from the airport, each of us arriving separately. But Chan (\"Nobody calls me Channing\"), being at that stage of celebrity when he doesn't mind spending time with a reporter, has taken it upon himself to redo the plans his publicist made. Even if that means sitting in the Montgomery airport, where he has flown from L.A., an extra hour until my flight gets in from New York City. \"I hope it's okay that I canceled your car so you can ride with me,\" he says. \"There's only one bar in the airport, so you should be able to find me.\"\n\nThat's easy. He's the only person there. Well, aside from the bartender and a lovely woman in her forties with one arm who, much to his embarrassment, has just paid for his fourth Coors Light. (It is close to five o'clock Alabama time.) \"Aw, man, you shouldn't have done that,\" says Chan, going over to her table, where she is sitting alone with her Subway sandwich. \"But, um, thanks.\" It's hard to tell whether she knows he's somebody or just thinks he's cute. He has her all shy and giggling, though.\n\nHis driver, from Touch of Class limo service, is waiting by the door. \"This is Thomas,\" says Chan. Thomas, who's decked out in a pressed black suit and cap befitting the royal guard, and who speaks with a proper Scottish accent, tips his hat. \"He just moved here from Scotland,\" says Chan, clearly impressed.\n\n\"It's quite\u2026different,\" says Thomas.\n\nChan slouches down in the backseat of the black town car. He has an iPhone in his hand and a Kindle poking out of his bag.\n\nWhat are you reading?\n\n\"I got two books on this thing,\" he says, \"about the start and finish of the Roman Empire. I don't have to read this stuff, but I love it.\" (It's in preparation, he says, for a role.) He's wearing the standard young-guy-in-Hollywood uniform\u2014ripped jeans hanging off his butt, sideways baseball hat, cotton button-down shirt\u2014which, oddly, also turns out to be pretty close to the standard young-guy-in-rural-Alabama uniform. \"You ready to get all country?\" he asks.\n\nWe're headed thirty-three miles northeast, to what Chan calls his \"favorite place on the planet, by far\": his uncle Bruce's ranch. Three hundred acres in the middle of nowhere. Wetumpka, to be precise. It's where his mama was raised. And though his formative years were spent in Tampa, Wetumpka is what Channing Tatum calls home. He escapes here every chance he gets, and that's not bullshit. \" 'Cause it's real, you know? You'll see.\" But first, he needs to \"take a pee\" and pick up a couple of six-packs for his uncle Bruce. Thomas steers the town car into a Citgo station with a minimart. While Chan is in the loo, a few truckers buying chew at the cash register size up his ride. \"Good-lookin' black car sittin' there,\" says one. \"Is that there yer limo-zeen?\" says the other.\n\nNot mine, I say. It's Channing Tatum's.\n\n\"Hmmph. We don't see a whole lotta those round here. Who'd you say that was?\"\n\nChanning Tatum. He's an actor.\n\nBlank stares.\n\nYou ever see A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints? Or\u2026Step Up?\n\nBlank stares.\n\nHe's gonna be in G.I. Joe this summer.\n\nAh, okay, him they've heard of.\n\nChan comes out of the restroom, gives a wave to the truckers, and tosses a couple of six-packs of Bud into the backseat, and we take off. He rolls down the window, sticks his head out. \"I love the smell of country.\" He turns to me. \"It's just one of those really quiet places,\" he says, \"and there's real folks here. Just, you know, real people. We're probably gonna shoot some guns when we get to Uncle Bruce's. You ever shoot before?\"\n\n\n\nA few miles later, we pull up to the ranch. It is some gorgeous country. \"That's his house over there,\" says Chan, pointing to a log cabin in the distance. \"And that used to be my nanny's house.\" (He means nanny as in grandmother.) \"And that porch right there was, like, my childhood. And that pond was where I used to fish with my nanny, right there. We used to fish with liver as bait.\"\n\nWe're heading down a long gravelly dirt road. \"Just pull up next to the shed,\" Chan tells Thomas. It's like a big open barn, a former tractor shed with an outdoor kitchen, a stone fireplace, and a stage for when the wagon trains come through and they have a little entertainment. Bruce is waiting by a smoker made from an old propane tank, where he has six chickens roasting for dinner. Aunt Dot is at the outdoor stove whipping up corn bread and peach cobbler. Twenty-four of Channing Tatum's relatives\u2014including Denver the fireman and Dustin the professional bull rider\u2014are due here any minute. But that's not unusual. Most of these relatives live on the ranch; the rest are a stone's throw away.\n\n\"Boy!\" says Uncle Bruce, when he spots his nephew. They hug like they both just got out of prison.\n\n\"This is Uncle Bruce,\" Chan says proudly.\n\n\"How you doin', son?\" says Bruce.\n\n\"Doin' good. How you doin', sir?\"\n\nFrom behind us, a noise. \"Ahem.\" It's Thomas, who's still here. Standing at attention next to the smoker, with Chan's bags hanging from one arm and mine from the other. \"Sorry, mate,\" says Chan, pressing some bills into Thomas's hand.\n\n\"Thank you, sir,\" says Thomas.\n\n\"Come on, Bruce, let's show her the house,\" says Chan. Bruce goes to get the Polaris, a funky little ranger that they tool around the ranch on when they're not using the four-wheeler. \"We don't want the lady havin' to walk too far.\" On the way here, Chan had described Uncle Bruce as the rock of his life, the definition of decency. He told me how Uncle Bruce fell off his horse and broke his neck in three places (\"Just like Christopher Reeve,\" Bruce says) but recovered enough to still do the buck dance. He's a rugged-looking 65-year-old with a white handlebar mustache, dressed in tight Levi's, a studded belt, and a Wrangler shirt with iron horse ranch, the name of his spread, embroidered on the front.\n\nBruce pulls the Polaris up and hops off. He tells Chan to chill for a minute. Gotta check on the chickens first.\n\n\"Aw, man,\" says Chan as Bruce lifts the lid off the smoker. \"That smells good!\"\n\n\"Darn right,\" says Uncle Bruce.\n\nA few minutes later, we drive off to Uncle Bruce's cabin. \"He built it himself,\" says Chan, \"and I'm a-gonna build mine right about there.\" He points to a little spot under the trees. (About the thickening accent: He'd warned me that he slips into country talk within minutes of being with his family.)\n\n\"That's right,\" says Bruce. \"We gonna build him a little cabin, right there, overlookin' the pond.\"\n\n\"Nothin' big,\" says Chan.\n\n\"Just enough for him and Jenna to come and relax, and for Jenna's folks to visit. Ride horses, four-wheelers\u2026\"\n\nBruce already has the plans drawn up for Chan's cabin; it's going to be part of his wedding present to his nephew. (In July, Channing is going to marry his girlfriend, Jenna Dewan, whom he met when they co-starred in Step Up.) Bruce thinks it'll be good, as he gets more and more famous, to have a place to go, away from the phonies. Where he'll always be protected. \"Ain't nobody gonna mess with nobody up here,\" Bruce says. But these days, when Chan visits, he sleeps in Uncle Bruce's second bedroom or the bunkhouse, where there's a trough that has been refashioned into a tub. \"It's bigger than the tub at the Soho Grand,\" Chan says.\n\n\"The who?\" says Uncle Bruce.\n\nWe're on the porch of the cabin now. \"You come right in and make yourself at home,\" Bruce says. \"Don't let that buffalo scare ya.\"\n\nWait. Is that\u2026?\n\n\"Yup, killed 'em all myself,\" he says, referring to the buffalo, the two bucks, and the turkey stuffed and mounted on his living room wall. \"I have a motto: You don't kill anything you ain't gonna eat.\"\n\nAnd the chickens we're having tonight?\n\n\"Oh, Dot got those at the Winn-Dixie.\"\n\nWhew.\n\n\"I remember when you killed your first deer up here,\" Uncle Bruce says to Chan. And to me: \"He was wild as a buck.\" Chan, he means, not the deer. \"He'd take off running. Three hundred acres here and he can run them all.\" He says he never thought Chan would go off and be a movie star\u2014he was a restless kid with dyslexia and ADD who did lousy in school\u2014but he's not worried about him turning into one of those Hollywood phonies. \"That's all I told him when he got into this: 'Don't forget your roots, son.' \"\n\n\n\nThe week before, Channing Tatum strolls into the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood in a lush Armani sweater and sunglasses. Heads turn. He's that good-looking. He's on some nutty diet to look extrabuff for a photo shoot, so he sits at the poolside restaurant and orders\u2026a water. \"I have a special meal plan that I'm on,\" he says. \"It's pretty much just chicken and broccoli and brown rice. Four times a day. And egg whites.\" All this for a photo shoot? \"Just to get lean. I got a job coming up, too, that I'm starting in August, that I'm starting to train for. It's called The Eagle of the Ninth. It's a Kevin Macdonald film. He did The Last King of Scotland.\"\n\nHe has gorgeous green eyes.\n\n\"Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you so much, ma'am,\" he says, as though he never heard such a thing before. \"That was really sweet.\" Every once in a while, you meet a guy like Channing Tatum, a kid on the cusp of stardom who seems so decent, humble even, that you hope Uncle Bruce is right and that he won't turn into a jerk.\n\nAnd he might not. When I ask him, for example, to tell me the story of his life, he shrugs and says, \"I got crazy lucky. Like, sometimes I think I won the lottery or something.\" He pauses, takes a look at the crowd at the Sunset Marquis\u2014the usual smattering of agents and celebs. (This is a guy who will later admit that his favorite restaurant is Cracker Barrel.) \"At times it feels like the bottom's gonna fall out. Just 'cause I don't really know how I got here. But I just keep moving forward, and it just keeps getting better and better.\"\n\nHe has three movies coming out in the next eight months. He's about to marry a woman he calls, in all earnestness, \"the love of my life.\" And the best part? He doesn't have to spritz perfume at the Tommy Hilfiger counter at Dillard's anymore\u2014which, aside from dancing at a club in Tampa, was his last real job before making it big.\n\nHe's 29. A part Native American son of a roofer who fell through a roof, broke his back, and ended up a traveling salesman, and of a mother who never doubted him. \"If it wasn't for her literally doing my homework for me, I would not have even graduated high school. Guaranteed.\" Ten years ago, he was an unemployed college dropout. He had been good enough at football to land a partial scholarship to Wake Forest. But shortly before freshman year started, he got called with the bad news: Though he tested high, his grades weren't good enough. So he ended up taking a scholarship at Glenville State in West Virginia. \"A tiny little school,\" he says. \"You know, small small town. I liked the people and the players and stuff, but I got there and I was like, this is not what I wanted. The reality started to sink in about, you know, doing football as a job.\" He lasted one year. Went home to Tampa and got a job framing houses, \"pounding nails in the sun,\" for $7.75 an hour. Then one night, out drinking, a buddy told him that Dillard's was hiring at the perfume counter for $10 an hour. \"I was like, $10 to sit in an air-conditioned place and spray cologne on a piece of paper? Yeah, I'm gonna do that.\"\n\nHe got fired from the perfume counter\u2014\"Actually, I quit the day they were going to fire me\"\u2014for breaking into dances in the department store. And he went to work in a Tampa club, where he actually got paid to dance. Then he quit that, too, deciding to take his shot in the land of opportunity: South Beach. His first week there, as he wandered around looking for a job, \"a creepy old man\" stopped him on the street and told him he could be a model. Told him he could make $1,500 a day. Told him that all he had to do was\u2026come back to his apartment.\n\nChan took off in the other direction. But when he got to his dumpy rental, he thought about what the guy had said. Maybe he could be a model. The next day, he walked into a modeling agency and got hired. Soon he was doing soda commercials (Mountain Dew and Pepsi); then he got picked up as a face (and body) of Abercrombie &amp;amp; Fitch. Then Armani. Back in Wetumpka, no one knew what to make of this, but they were darn proud. He was making real money. But he didn't want to be a model for the rest of his life. So, of course, he moved to L.A. to be an actor.\n\nAnd the next lucky thing happened: He was good at it.\n\nBut he also worked his ass off to get here. \"My mom always said, 'Luck is nothing but preparation and opportunity.' \" In a week, he's going to start training with a mid-martial-arts instructor for his next role (though he's already a black belt), and he'll keep reading about the Roman Empire. \"I think because I've had that history of not really being great in school, I probably try to overcompensate. That's why I try to read so many books. Just so I don't feel\u2026uneducated.\"\n\nThe producer Lauren Shuler Donner, who lobbied to have Tatum cast in one of his first roles (the romantic comedy She's the Man), saw the quality in him that she thinks \"all our big superstars have: an unpredictableness. Like Russell Crowe and Mel Gibson. There's an unpredictableness inside that makes them mesmerizing to us, and Chan has that.\"\n\nIn his few years in Hollywood, Tatum has managed to star in a broad range of films, some of which (like A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints) were a hit with the critics, if not the box office. Others, like Step Up and Coach Carter, were what he calls \"tweeners\u2014you know, those midlevel-budget movies that just kinda do good.\" But he is fully aware that the pressure is on with G.I. Joe. \"This is, like, my first step out into the whole commercial realm,\" he says. \"I hope it does okay.\" (But the early reviews are dismal. Even his co-star, Sienna Miller, who adores Channing, admits that, \"you know, G.I. Joe, it's not going to be the best acting work we've ever done.\")\n\nHalfway through our dinner, I persuade him to eat something, so he orders a piece of chicken. \"Just plain,\" he tells the waiter. \"No seasoning, nothing.\" Don't worry, he assures me, \"I'll eat like a real person when we get to Alabama. We're gonna have so much fun. You wanna pull out all the stops?\" Um, okay. \"You don't want to get on a bull, do you?\" Um, sure. \"You want to get on a bull?\" The agent at the next table does a double take. \"No, you don't want to get on a bull. You might get hurt. But we'll do it up big, and you'll see a totally different side of me. I talk different, I walk different, everything. I don't have one single bad memory to where I'm gonna take you. Not one. It was my sanctuary. I hated school, wasn't good in school, and me and my dad butted heads about that. But nothing mattered when I went home to Alabama.\"\n\nHe wants to tell me more, but his publicist has arrived and he needs to go get fitted for his cover shoot tomorrow. \"All I had was chicken!\" he tells her.\n\n\n\nBack at the ranch, Chan is insisting I get on the back of the four-wheeler so he can drive me out to the edges of the property. \"Just hold on,\" he instructs, wrapping my arms around his waist and tearing off through the woods. It's bloody terrifying, particularly when we end up in a muddy ditch far from the shed and he can't get the thing started up again. The sun is setting. We're stuck. My cell phone doesn't work. I'm thinking the bull might have been a better option. \"We're not gonna die here,\" says Chan. \"You gotta calm down. You never been in the country before, have you?\" He pushes it out of the ditch and gets it started again. \"Toldja.\"\n\nBack at the shed, his family is discussing the upcoming wedding. Chan has invited every relative who is here tonight to come to Malibu in July. They are all flying out on the same commercial flight. A couple of his cousins took extra jobs to save up. Almost none of his relatives have been to L.A. before, and there is much angst over what to wear. \"Wear whatever you want,\" says Chan. \"Wear jeans if you want.\"\n\n\"It says cocktail attire on the invitation,\" says his cousin Sheryl, Bruce's daughter, who works on political campaigns in Alabama. A few other cousins have been trying on gowns, and the men are contemplating going to that place down in Montgomery that rents tudos. \"Really,\" says Chan, \"don't go renting tudos.\"\n\n\"I think Daddy should wear a tudo,\" says Sheryl.\n\n\"I ain't wearing no tudo,\" says Bruce. \"I'm wearing my black jeans and black hat.\"\n\n\"Perfect,\" says Chan. \"If Uncle Bruce don't do the stanky leg and the buck dance at my wedding, I'm gonna be pissed off.\"\n\nSheryl rolls her eyes and says to me, \"I just don't want us showin' up like the Clampetts, you know? I mean, my daddy never even seen a homosexual before.\"\n\nA little smile from Chan, who quickly changes the subject to bull riding. He wants me to sit down next to Dustin's buddy Sid, who made him get on his first bull. \"Ask him how he lost his finger,\" says Chan, and Sid mimes picking his nose\u2014a booger bit it off\u2014and\u2026booger jokes ensue. Everyone is laughing hysterically. As the sky goes black, the family is gathered around in a circle, in folding chairs, with Dot and Bruce sitting on the swing in the middle of the shed, rocking and holding hands. Chan takes turns bouncing various kids in his lap. Another case of Bud is pulled out of the fridge. A few of his cousins tell him they just went to the movie theater to see him in Fighting and didn't much care for all the gore. Then someone brings up politics.\n\n\"Do not say you voted for Barack Obama,\" says his cousin Sheryl.\n\n\"I voted for Barack Obama,\" says Chan.\n\n\"Don't you go saying that around here,\" says Sheryl. \"You'll be like everybody else out there.\" She means in Hollywood. \"Nobody around here wants to hear that you voted for O-ba-ma.\"\n\n \"But I did,\" says Chan.\n\n\"Well, then, shush,\" says Sheryl. \"You gotta have respect for the people who live here.\"\n\n\"I don't care. If they don't like me because I voted for Obama, then fuck them. I like horses and I like Obama. Nothin' wrong with that.\"\n\nIt's getting late. Close to midnight.\n\nChan has promised to drive me back to my digs at the Drury Inn &amp;amp; Suites. \"That is a beautiful hotel,\" says Sheryl. \"It's seven stories.\" But Chan, who's had \"a few too many beers,\" is worried about driving, so he asks Uncle Bruce, who's sober as a stick, to deliver me back to Montgomery.\n\nUncle Bruce obliges. An enormous pickup truck (the kind with six wheels) is pulled up to the shed. He and Aunt Dot get in the front seat, and Chan and I sit in the back.\n\n\"You really live in New York City?\" asks Uncle Bruce as we head down the highway. \"I been there.\" It was around 1957, he says, and he and his mama went to visit his aunt Merle. On the train. Days and days on the train. And when they arrived, \"I was like, Shee-it. There were all these fellas laying on the street. I said, 'Whatcha all, dead? Are they all dead?' And somebody says, 'No, they ain't dead, they homeless.' \" Aunt Dot laughs; she's heard this story before. \"And I says, 'Well, then, get 'em homes!' You still got that up there in New York?\"\n\nWe pull up to the Drury Inn &amp;amp; Suites, next to Sam's Club. Chan insists on walking me in. At the counter, he says good-bye.\n\n\"You see why I love it here, right?\"\n\nI do.\n\nlisa depaulo is a gq correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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