How Channing Tatum Learned to Tap-Dance for 'Hail, Caesar!'

How Channing Tatum learned to tap-dance (and sing, kind of) for the Coen brothers.

- Lane Brown

Channing Tatum has popped and locked in Step Up, vogued in viral videos, and waxed strip-club floors using only his pelvis in the Magic Mike movies, so naturally Joel and Ethan Coen assumed he’d be perfect for the big song-and-tap-dance number in their new comedy, Hail, Caesar! But no sooner had they cast him—as actor Burt Gurney, a Gene Kelly type starring in a movie-within-the-movie, a sailor musical in the mold of Anchors Aweigh—than two problems arose. “One, I don’t sing, and two, I don’t tap-dance,” says Tatum. “Joel and Ethan were like, ‘Here’s a part, which we hope you want, because no one else can do it.’ Knowing what it turned into, it’s hard to believe that was the truth.”

In the script, the number was “like five sentences,” says Tatum, but it grew into a technically onerous, relentlessly delightful six-minute sequence during which Tatum’s Naval cadet bemoans, with tongue slightly in cheek, his all-male work environment in the song “No Dames!,” which he sings while dancing with shipmates around a pub, on stools and tables among other precarious surfaces.