For Channing Tatum, starring in Beth de Araújo’s Sundance premiere Josephine made him look back on his own upbringing and think about parenting his own daughter.
Josephine explores the fallout from an eight-year-old girl (Mason Reeves)’s witnessing of sexual assault. As her parents (Gemma Chan and Tatum) wrestle with how to help their daughter cope, they must face their own fears around the topic and how to address it with their child.
“It just hit home,” Tatum said of reading De Araújo’s script. “My dad raised me in a certain way, Southern, very hard, in a way, he grew up in a very hard way. I saw him very much in Damon. And then as I kept reading, and me and Beth were talking more and more, I really started to see the similarities and some of the things that I was doing as a father.”
I wish I knew the answer of when is the right time to tell your child about this.
Beth de Araújo
“I have a 12-year-old,” he continued, “and you know, it’s hard. I came home after doing this, doing the press, with everybody in the premiere, and my daughter asked me how it went. And I haven’t really told her very much about what the movie was about, and then I found myself explaining the movie, and having a hard time even saying the word ‘rape’. She’s very, very smart, very clever. I know that she would be able to understand it, but it still made me… I’ve had conversations with her around this topic, but even just saying the word, I felt myself uncomfortable. And I think, this movie’s really highlighted what we don’t like to talk about is sometimes the most important things that we need to talk about.”
Gemma Chan, Mason Reeves and Channing Tatum in ‘Josephine’ by Beth de Araújo.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Greta Zozula
De Araújo said the film for her is about “an exploration of hyper-vigilance through an eight-year-old’s eyes. I wanted to take the idea of a child witnessing an event and being left with an enormous amount of fear, and taking that fear to an extreme and exploring how fear can influence our behavior. How does that affect someone who’s just had something pretty traumatic happen, and someone who has dealt with it maybe years before, and someone who has, pushed it away in many other ways? So three people coming at it in from very different ways.”
Chan was the first to sign onto the project. She said, “I think from the moment I first read the script,
Claire, or so much about her, resonated with me. She’s a complicated character. She’s had certain things happen in her life, not all of which she has shared with her husband — although that’s open to some interpretation — but she is just really wrestling with, how can she protect her daughter? How can she shield her, but also give her enough sense of the reality of the danger of the world?”
Essentially, it’s a crime that’s completely going unpunished and unchecked.
Gemma Chan
Chan and Tatum, who both also serve as producers on the film said they were continually horrified how shockingly short prison terms are for perpetrators of sexual assault, and how hard it is to report these crimes and to get a conviction.
“I was shocked at the amount of time that this guy could have gotten,” Tatum said. “I didn’t know.”
De Araújo added, “The mandatory minimum if you are convicted of rape in California is three years, and that used to be one year before the Stanford case [People v. Turner in 2016], which is a crazy thing to think about. It’s considered one of probably the worst crimes imaginable, and yet, the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, necessarily, in my opinion. The statistics are overwhelming. It’s one in four women in the United States, and it’s one in six men. I actually believe that that number is smaller. I think it’s probably one in five or one in four. I worked at the Los Angeles Rape and Battering crisis hotline, and it’s just much more under-reported for men [who are survivors of sexual assault.] I wish I knew the answer of when is the right time to tell your child about this, and I hope that it can open up the conversation of trying to figure out what that answer is, and trying to figure out a way that we can put more resources into this subject.”
And, Chan pointed out, “That’s also if it even gets to trial or for charges to be brought. I know that in the U.K. where I live, the statistics are less than 3% of reported rapes end up with a charge within the first year. It’s frightening. Essentially, it’s a crime that’s completely going unpunished and unchecked.”
This was Reeves very first acting role and De Araújo had actually stumbled on her by chance in a grocery store.
Reeves said that going into it she “had no idea” who Chan and Tatum were. “In fact, I didn’t know any actors.” Despite the heavy subject matter though, she fondly recalled bonding with them as her parents on set. “It was really fun because me and Gemma got to have a flour fight with the food, the baking flour. And Channing, whenever we were in between scenes, he would pretend to give me a high five, and then take it away the last second.”
“See that look that she giving me right now?” Tatum laughed. “I got maybe about 150,000 dirty looks a day, and she would terrorize me. That was her methodology to begin becoming an actress.”
To watch the full interview click on the video above.
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