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Channing Tatum is accustomed to being laughed at. The actor, dancer, and gifted physical comedian has, in his words, “made a career on being the butt of the joke.” As the father of seven-year-old Everly, he’s learned that playing the fool—“falling down on her, fake hitting myself in the face with the door”—was a way of teaching her to be free.
But no amount of parental support can compete with peer pressure, even at a young age, which led to a heart-shattering moment when a preschool-aged Everly took off a beloved watermelon-patterned cape for fear of the other kids laughing at her. “It was the very first time that I felt her being aware of other people having opinions on what she was wearing,” he said in a recent video call from a light-filled Los Angeles home. “But watching how she was dealing with it and how she got through it was gorgeous. Now she’s still her little, weird, sort of shiny self.”
That moment with the watermelon cape is the origin story of The One and Only Sparkella, Tatum’s new children’s book, in which a little girl and her dad both learn the power of being their shiny, feather-boa-wearing selves. Resemblances between the dad of the book, illustrated by Kim Barnes, and Tatum himself are not at all coincidental. “I love a purple boa,” Tatum said “I love a fuchsia boa even more personally or magenta, but usually my daughter likes the magenta one so she takes that one. But technically, if I had to choose, I would like a tutu more than a boa because the boa feathers would always get in my mouth somehow. And sometimes it doesn’t match my nail polish or the makeup, so a tutu is always my go-to.”
The book is dedicated to Everly, of course, but also “all dads that might have a little girl.” As an actor Tatum was a natural fit for playing pretend and dress-up, but says he understands the awkwardness “of not even knowing how to even do it, just even free yourself up to play.” Diving into Everly’s world of fairies and secret maps, he says, “was one of the biggest rewards that I have been given. It’s just the dumb luckness of just going ‘All right, what do you want to do? Where do we want to go?’ And then just going on the ride.”
Having worked alongside his producing partner Reid Carolin on the script for Magic Mike, Tatum knew a bit about the writing process, but when his agent first suggested he write a book he hesitated. “I barely graduated high school and I don’t think that I should ever write anything,” he said, and though he credits his agent and publisher for the heavy lifting, the personal stuff is all there: “I vomited a bunch of my experiences with my little precocious, little trickster daughter onto the page, and they really held my hand through the process.”
The One and Only Sparkella arrives as Tatum prepares to end his roughly four-year break from the big screen, having starred in and codirected the road trip comedy Dog, which was filmed last year. But Sparkella—or even a potential Sparkella Cinematic Universe—will continue to keep him busy behind the scenes too. There’s a second and third book in the works, and he says he has some “medium-cool” ideas about potential Sparkella movies, or even a whole different fantasy series aimed at older kids. For someone who once claimed he should never write anything, the ideas seem to be coming fast.
“Right now, we’re really in the fun phase of just making cool stuff that is engaging,” he said. “I’m enjoying it here.”
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