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 Amanda Seyfried and Channing Tatum, on their promotional visit to Toronto last week for their movie Dear John. |
Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried co-star in Dear John, an unabashed romance about star-crossed lovers separated by current events.
The actors were in Toronto to promote Dear John last week, and proved to be well matched in terms of general appeal, charm and energy. (Both are actually better-looking in person than they are on the screen, which is frankly mind-boggling.)
She is tiny and feline and funny; he is tall and canine and boisterous. When we meet, Tatum is hopping up and down at the window — literally — exclaiming over the wonder of a snow flurry. Tatum is 29 and Seyfried is 24, and both are poised to be the next big thing.
Seyfried, who grew up in Allentown, Penn., became a model at age 11 and is an accomplished singer and dancer. She had roles in TV soap operas before graduating in 2004 to such movies as Mean Girls, Nine Lives, Alpha Dog, Mama Mia! and Jennifer’s Body.
Tatum grew up in Alabama and Mississippi and has all the southern charm you’d expect. He went to college on an athletic scholarship and worked at various jobs before becoming a model, a job that came to him, rather than vice versa. He made the change from model to actor and got noticed in such films as She’s The Man, Step Up, Stop-Loss and G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra.
He married his Step Up co-star, Jenna Dewan, last year. Tatum’s success has been swift and sure, and he calls himself crazy-lucky — “Like I won the lottery.”
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So what’s the view like from this point in their acting careers?
“Sometimes I’m scared that I’m giving too much away,” Seyfried said. “That’s my fear. We were just talking about all these websites and Twitter and Facebook. I share things, like pictures of my dog, but I was just talking to an old friend about how he is scared to put anything like that out there.
“When you’re an actor, or in the public eye, people want to know about your private life, but I think it can hinder how the audience feels when they watch you on screen. How believable are we? Talent can only go so far if the audience knows who you are, where you are, what you do all day, what your children do. That all scares me.”
“Especially now, for some reason,” added Tatum. “Everybody is so obsessed with getting to know these people they go to the movies to watch — what do they wear, what do they look like when they take out the garbage or when they’re having sex! They want to know all this stuff, and when they do, they want to tear them down for it.”
Tatum hopes people think about the characters he plays, not about him.
“If I play an albino humpback murderer, I hope they say, ‘Did you see that albino humpback murderer!?’ I don’t want them to identify so much with who I am as a person.”
He pauses to wonder if he’ll be in trouble with the Albino Humpback Murderer Anti-Defamation League. And laughs.
Asked about career plans, Tatum said, “You really don’t aim for anything further than what you’re doing at the moment.”
Seyfried agreed: “Expectations can really ruin everything. There are certain tricks to trying to secure a place in this industry. For a long time it was to try to do something different every time, and so far we’ve been able to do that. It’s really important to work with good actors and good directors and people who are in it for the same reasons you are.”
liz.braun@sunmedia.ca