Channing Tatum has revealed the reason why he took a five-year hiatus from acting in a recent interview with Vanity Fair.
The 42-year-old's last big role was in Kingsman: The Golden Circle in 2017, and has predominantly taken on voice roles since then.
Tatum took the world by storm in the early 2000s and 2010s, with 2006's Step Up and She's The Man, followed by his raunchy role in Magic Mike (2012) that had audiences salivating.
So popular was the hunk that Jimmy Kimmel even released a parody song about him, titled '(I Wanna) Channing All Over Your Tatum', featuring Jamie Foxx, Miley Cyrus, and Tatum himself.
Tatum explained in Vanity Fair why he had taken a hiatus from larger roles, telling the outlet that he became incredibly busy during the years following the release of Magic Mike - which was loosely based upon his time as a stripper in Tampa, Florida. "And I think shortly after that, I got really busy, and then life kind of fell apart, and then I stopped working for almost five years," he revealed.
In the interview, Tatum described how he eventually realized that he was no longer having fun acting, especially after Marvel scrapped a movie that he had reportedly been working on, based on the X-Men character Gambit - a superhero who can manipulate kinetic energy to get what he wants. Sadly, this is nothing new for Marvel, who tossed an upcoming Batgirl film that was on the cusp of completion, per Fortune.
"[The movie] got swallowed up into Disney by way of Marvel when they bought Fox, and ultimately I just think that the tone of the movie we wanted to make was very far from what they wanted to do - or, you know, maybe they're waiting to see how they do it with us or without us.
"We call every once in a while, but we've got to spiritually, emotionally, kind of mentally let it go," Tatum revealed.
He added that, at the time, he began working a lot - he'd been able to "check boxes" for milestones he'd only "hoped to dream about," but still felt unfulfilled.
This coincided with a difficult time in his personal life, as he and his ex-wife Jenna Dewan found they had grown apart after 10 years of marriage.
Dewan and Tatum - who share a nine-year-old daughter Everly - had met on the set of Step Up and were together until their divorce in 2019.
Due to the personal and professional pressure he felt around this time, Tatum chose to take a hiatus and focus on himself and his daughter instead.
Since his break from acting, the father-of-one now reportedly has five projects in the pipeline, including one called Pussy Island that's the directorial debut of his current girlfriend, Zoë Kravitz.
