Building a sterling filmography isn’t just about which projects you say yes to, but which you say no to — and this particular no still hurts Channing Tatum.
The actor got candid about “one of the biggest mistakes of my career” in a Tuesday interview with Vanity Fair: “Guillermo del Toro wanted to do Beauty and the Beast,” and Tatum turned it down.
Tatum was to play “his version of the Beast,” but it was a hectic time for the Blink Twice star.
Emma Watson and Dan Stevens in ‘Beauty and the Beast’.
Walt Disney Pictures/Everett
“I’d just had a baby, I was on a movie that was absolutely killing me, and the script wasn’t totally there yet,” he explained. “I was just in a place in my head that I was like, ‘I don’t think I can do this right now.’ It was the biggest mistake, because I’m the biggest Guillermo fan ever. And I think Guillermo doing Beauty and the Beast would’ve been the sickest movie ever.”
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to representatives for Tatum and del Toro.
Tatum shares one child with ex Jenna Dewan: Everly, who was born in 2013. The Alabama-born actor didn’t reveal which film was “absolutely killing” him at the time. But he did make a whopping five movies that year and three the year before, including the career-transforming run of the feature adaptation of 21 Jump Street into Steven Soderbergh‘s striptease spectacular Magic Mike.
The actor will soon appear in the film Roofman opposite Kirsten Dunst, who asked him in the interview, “and [del Toro] never did it?”
Tatum replied that the Oscar-winning Frankenstein director had “a billion other things that he wants to do. He’s such a creator. I’ll probably never forgive myself on that one, but I hope we get to work together one day.”
Tatum and Dunst were recently in Toronto to premiere the new film by Derek Cianfrance at the 2025 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival. While on stage accepting a Tribute Performer Award at the annual TIFF Tribute Awards on Sunday, Tatum revealed that this almost wasn’t his first time working with the director, nor was Beauty and the Beast the only role he regrets turning down.
“As I was just reminded, it was about 20 years ago that I did kind of one of my first real, I guess, acting roles, and Derek saw it and, and he believed in me, I think way before I ever believed in myself,” he shared, going on to explain that he was eventually offered, and declined, the leading role in Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine. “I was absolutely terrified of that role specifically, and I didn’t go.”
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Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst in ‘Roofman’.
Davi Russo/Paramount Pictures
The role of Dean Pereira eventually went to Ryan Gosling, and proved a big break for the young Canadian star, leading to a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor.
As for del Toro, the visionary Mexican filmmaker moved on to other classic fables: The Shape of Water, his Oscar-winning reimagining of Creature From the Black Lagoon in 2017, and most recently Frankenstein. Del Toro told EW at TIFF, where the film played after an August premiere in Venice, that despite it taking three decades to get the film into production, he thinks, “Thank God it didn’t happen until now.”