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THE MOVIE: Fighting

THE STARS:
Channing Tatum • Terrence Howard • Zulay Henao
DIRECTOR: Dito Montiel

Channing Tatum

2009 should establish Channing Tatum as one of Hollywood’s top leading men, with his roles in Fighting and the upcoming GI Joe. In Fighting, Tatum portrays Shawn MacArthur, a loser selling counterfeit merchandise on the streets of New York, until he’s confronted by Harvey Boarden ( Terrence Howard ), a conman who sees his raw potential as a street fighter.

U.S. RELEASE: April 24 2009, Nationwide
• Rated: PG-13

THE COMMENTS:

Did your dancing background help with the fighting scenes?:
Yeah, I’d say that dancing has helped, even in acting. If you’re comfortable with your body, then you can relax. You don’t get tight or tense and even choreography, moving with people, staging, knowing your distance. The most difficult is distance when you’re doing those fake fights. You’re swinging with all your might and they have to time you and you always make eye contact so you can’t know exactly how far away you are because you’re looking in someone’s eyes.

What was the hardest thing about doing the fight sequences:
Keeping up the emotion in a fight is hard because you’re filming one fight scene for 14 hours a day. You need to show emotion when you take a punch or grab somebody and slam them into a wall or a plate-glass window.

Can you talk about working with Terrence Howard?:
I’ve loved watching that guy act since I remember seeing him in films. It was way before I was an actor, or even planned to act. And then I met him at Sundance and he had seen me in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints and he had all these amazing things to say about it and about my performance in it, and it literally welled me up because it was the first time that I had a real actor, someone that I really thought of as a great actor, tell me that he liked my work.

Would you like to see a sequel to Fighting?:
If it’s Terrence and Dito [Montiel, the director], absolutely. I’ll totally do it. I couldn’t see the movie being done without them. You can pretty much start Fighting 2 with Terrence knocking on my door, ‘I’m in trouble,’ and I’m like, ‘Of course you’re in trouble, you’re Harvey.’

You’ve gone from this movie to GIJoe. Was that daunting?:
It was more than daunting, I had no idea what I was doing. I was terrified of the movie. I had no aspirations to go do a huge film like that, not yet in my career. I didn’t feel ready for it. But it’s just acting, it’s a different style of acting, it is about the big explosions, you’re not sitting there trying to do Shakespeare.

Written by Judy Sloane. Back to top

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Images above © Universal
Feature © 2009 Visual Imagination.
Not for reproduction.

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