Channing Tatum reexamines what it’s really like to live happily ever after — and sometimes that includes dissolving what feels like a fairy tale.
one Vanity Fair Profile published Tuesday, the “Magic Mike” star reflected on his marriage to ex-wife Jenna Dewan and how her involvement in magical thinking caused him to ignore the problems in their relationship.
“I think we told each other a story when we were young, and we continued to tell each other that story, no matter how blatantly life told us we were so different,” Tatum told the magazine.
Tatum and Dewan met on the set of ‘Step Up’ in 2006 and the couple quickly started dating. For many, their love seemed to mirror their dynamic in their movie — or star in a popular “opposites attract” troupe seen in beloved stories like
“Beauty and the Beast” or “The Lady and the Tramp”.
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In real life and on “Step Up,” Dewan was a professional dancer, while Tatum was a little tougher. The couple married in 2009 and had a daughter, Everly, in 2013. But Tatum told Vanity Fair that while her life felt like a Disney animated classic, “something just didn’t fill me.”
At first he thought it had something to do with his career, but realized “it was really about my life”.
“We fought for a long time, even though we both knew we were broken up,” Tatum told the magazine about his marriage.
She added that becoming a parent accentuated their rift.
“When you really parents“, Tatum told the press. “You really understand the differences between you two. Because he yells at you all day. How you parent differently, how you look at the world, how you move through the world.”
Dewan also mentioned health magazine of the year 2018 how her marriage wasn’t as “perfect” as it seemed.
“When people say you have such a perfect life, I want to scream and tell them nobody’s perfect,” she said at the time. “I think there are such things as big games. It’s a great fit as long as you grow together, and I think we’ve really grown together so far.”
The couple broke up later in 2018, after nearly nine years of marriage, a realization Tatum told Vanity Fair was initially “scary and terrifying.” But Tatum now says the split was the right thing to do.
“It was probably just what we needed,” she told Vanity Fair. “I don’t think I’ve ever worked, I think, with myself like I’ve had to really try to figure out what’s next.”
To learn how Tatum gained more control over the narrative of his life, head over to Vanity Fair to read the entire profile.
