All The Right Moves

She has piroutted and pelvic - thrusted her way into your - and channing's - heart. Now Jenna Dewan Tatum opens up about how dancing curbed her bad - girl instincts, her legendary LIP sync battle, and her primal sexual connection with her hubs.

- Katie L. Connor

We all have our emotional triggers. One of Jenna Dewan Tatum’s is Lifetime’s Dance Moms. She was a year old when her parents split, leading Jenna and her mom, who got a job in pharmaceuticals, to relocate every three years. They finally settled in Grapevine, Texas, when Jenna was in high school. Her one constant? Dance. “Everywhere we would move, I’d find a new studio,” she tells me over a grilled kale salad at L.A.’s Chateau Marmont. “That show gives me such anxiety. I lived it. I can’t watch.” A chance meeting with Dance Moms’ infamous coach, Abby Lee Miller, was especially jarring. She says Abby compared her to the reality series’ now-14-year-old breakout star, Maddie Ziegler. “She was like, ‘I knew you were the Maddie! Come to my studio! Bring your daughter!’” Jenna recalls, “I was like, absolutely not.”

Jenna, who is the face of Danskin, is all too familiar with the brutal realities of the dance world. “Your whole life is a competition, and it made me so hard on myself. If I dropped my heel on a turn, it was a day of crying. My mom would be like, ‘It’s okay. You’re your own worst critic.’” Jenna kept at it, and as a freshman at the University of Southern California, she got her big break dancing backup for Janet Jackson. Stints with P.Diddy and *NSYNC soon followed. But it wasn’t until the 2006 dance-mance Step Up that the world—and her costar Channing Tatum— would know her name. Clearly, Jenna made a lasting impression—she and Magic Mike, er, we mean Channing, have been married for more than seven years and have a 3-and-a-half year-old daughter, Everly.