Love him or hate him, you’ve gotta give Howard Stern this: he gets celebrities to open up. Take, for example, his interview yesterday with a Magic Mike XXL-promoting Channing Tatum, who had some refreshingly choice words for his first big studio blockbuster, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
“I’ll be honest: I fucking hate that movie,” he told Stern. “I was pushed into doing that movie.” It was the result of a three-picture deal with Paramount after his first feature, Coach Carter (“I was just the token white kid in that movie”), and as a young actor starting out, Tatum recalled, the deal’s $60,000-$100,000 price points sounded pretty good. But years later, after gaining some degree of success, “you have like a dream job that you want to go do… and the studio calls you.”
Tatum’s biggest problem with the movie? “The script wasn’t any good!… I didn’t wanna do something that was 1) bad, and 2) I didn’t know if I wanted to be G.I. Joe.” But he didn’t have much of a choice—the contractual obligation boiled down to “You’re doing this or we’re gonna sue you,” according to the actor—so he did his best as Duke, the leading role Stern revealed had originally been developed for Mark Wahlberg. (“Maybe I shoulda done my Wahlberg impression for the whole movie, the movie would’ve been better. My acting would’ve been better too.”) Tatum confessed “a little bit” of a shock that G.I. Joe did as well as it did, but claims it didn’t increase his prestige much; “The Coen Brothers are not watching G.I. Joe.”
Oh, and elsewhere in the interview, the actor said he basically doesn’t know what the hell’s going on with that puzzling Ghostbusters reboot that’s not the female Ghostbuster reboot. “That thing’s gotten messy, I gotta be honest,” he told Stern. “There’s a lot of people doing a lot of things on Ghostbusters… Yeah. I don’t know, is the answer.” So yeah, not really news, but if Ghostbusters in the headline got you to read this great G.I. Joe stuff, everybody wins, eh?
[via /Film]