Channing Tatum isn’t one to air his dirty laundry; but after staying mum on the matter for three years, the Magic Mike star is letting Vanity Fair in on why his decade-long marriage to Jenna Dewan crumbled in 2019.
“We fought for it for a really long time, even though we both sort of knew that we had sort of grown apart,” he admitted in his February cover story for the magazine.
“I think we told ourselves a story when we were young, and we just kept telling ourselves that story, no matter how blatantly life was telling us that we were so different. But when you’re actually parents, you really understand differences between the two of you. Because it is screaming at you all day long. How you parent differently, how you look at the world, how you go through the world,” he continued.
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The two tied the knot in 2009 after falling in love on the set of their 2006 film Step Up. The co-parents share a daughter named Everly, whom they welcomed in 2013.
Though Channing knew ending the relationship was the right decision, that didn’t make it any less “super scary and terrifying.”
“Your life just turns on its axis. This whole plan that you had literally just turns into sand and goes through your fingers and you’re just like, ‘Oh, sh*t. What now?’” he explained.
The divorce led Channing down a journey of reflection and self-improvement, which he believes “was probably exactly what I needed.” The 22 Jump Street actor added he never would have put in the work “in the way that I had to do the work on myself to really try to figure out what next” had it not been for their split.
His daughter was also a big motivator in his path of healing. “It just started with my daughter. I just dropped everything and just focused on her,” Tatum said.
Tatum revealed his mini hiatus from the spotlight is “truly the best possible thing that I ever could have done” because it’s brought him and Everly so much closer. “In the alone time that I have with just me and her, we’ve become best friends.”
Since the split, Channing has been romantically linked to singer-songwriter Jessie James and actress Zoë Kravitz, whom he’s been going steady with since 2021.
