Channing Tatum Sent Quentin Tarantino an Email Every Day for a Month About ‘The Hateful Eight’
How about some news regarding this month’s most highly-anticipated release that doesn’t have Star Wars in the title? Channing Tatum’s involvement with The Hateful Eight is one of the worst kept secrets, though Tatum, Quentin Tarantino and The Weinstein Company have refused to reveal his actual role, inspiring plenty of speculation and nitpicking of the film’s trailers. We won’t spoil his part for you, but Tatum does have some delightful stories about his time working with Tarantino and the cast.
The actor appeared on The Tonight Show on Friday, where he told Jimmy Fallon about how he neurotically “sent about an email a day for about a month” to Tarantino regarding his role, fearing that a better actor might come along and steal his part. Tatum says “I was just praying that no one really tough was up for the role,” and joked that he was threatening any potential competition, suggesting that perhaps he could be locked in a room with other actors, forced to literally fight for the part. He jokingly adds, “I’m so happy that he didn’t say, ‘Well Mike Tyson is up for this role.’”
But that’s not all. Tatum discusses how nervous he was, knowing that Tarantino has his own stable of recurring stars who are like “an actual family,” making him the odd man out. He says that when he went in for the table read he was “terrified,” and then he almost killed one of our most valuable actors:
I made this really dumb, overzealous decision and I pull him in really close, and this is at a table read, and I almost pull Bruce Dern out of his chair and he’s like, ‘You jerk! You almost pulled my arm out of the socket!’ I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. I just almost killed one of the best actors of our time.’ And I’m mortified.
We already knew about Tatum’s private online messaging tendencies thanks to last year’s Sony data hack, which resulted in tons of leaked exchanges and memos, including one very hilarious email from Tatum. We did not know that we would almost lose Bruce Dern due to Tatum’s goofy super-strength and overzealous commitment to table-reads.