Channing Tatum may have seemed like a borderline soccer pro in She’s the Man, but the actor admitted his skills weren’t as impressive in the sport as they seemed onscreen.
Tatum appeared on Entertainment Tonight‘s newest edition of “Spilling the E-Tea” alongside his Fly Me to the Moon co-star Scarlett Johansson. During the segment, the Avengers actor asked the Magic Mike star if he ever faked a skill to get a job, and he noted he did for “a movie about soccer.”
“It definitely wasn’t about soccer, but I played soccer in [She’s the Man], and I definitely led on a little bit more that I could play soccer [better] than I actually could. But I pulled it off,” he said. “I was like, ‘Just cut away when I fuck up.’”
Instead of being good at soccer, the 21 Jump Street star admitted he just tried to “run and look really athletic during the shots.”
She’s the Man is a take on William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and follows Amanda Bynes’ Viola as she pretends to be her twin brother, James Kirk’s Sebastian, in order to prove she can play soccer on a boys’ team after the girls’ team at her school is cut. Tatum portrays Duke Orsino, the star player on the boys’ team Viola joins, who she eventually falls for.
In a conversation with Paper Magazine in 2018, Bynes revealed that she had to fight for Tatum to be cast in the role of Duke because he wasn’t famous yet.
“He’d just done a Mountain Dew commercial and I was like, ‘This guy’s a star — every girl will love him,’” she recalled. “But [the producers] were like, ‘He’s so much older than all of you!’ And I was like, ‘It doesn’t matter! Trust me!’”
