We've seen Channing Tatum get physical plenty of times before in other films, sometimes in action movies, sometimes to make us laugh. But Foxcatcher, perhaps the most dramatic role of his career, has him taking on the punishing sport of amateur wrestling, and with it one of the most grueling productions he's ever endured. He tells Yahoo...
“It was the most suffocating sport I’d ever played. You can box and hit the bag or something like that, but you can’t wrestle if you don’t want to actually do it. It’s a thankless, painful sport.”
He also talked about the various injuries he suffered while shooting the Bennett Miller-directed film and how that informed his performance, making it more authentic...
“Look, when you’re in that kind of a movie, it doesn’t matter if you’re hurt or not. You keep moving forward. I don’t think my knees will ever be the same after that, and I still have cauliflower ear. But if I came out of the movie without it, I’d feel like I didn’t do something right.”
So it sounds like Tatum's good looks got mangled a little bit, all in service of a film that has been high on the awards radar for months, both for Miller and his cast which includes Steve Carell and Mark Ruffalo. The film centers on the true story of schizophrenic millionaire John du Pont who begins an Olympic wrestling facility on his compound and the friendship he forms with the grappling Schultz brothers. But du Pont's sanity began to fracture, and the relationship would end in murder. The new trailer is dark and intense, with Carell barely recognizable as du Pont.
Foxcatcher hits theaters November 14th.
