From his action movies (Fighting, the G.I. Joe movies) to his dance-focused dramas (Step Up, the Magic Mike franchise), it can be easy to forget that Channing Tatum is really freaking funny. It’s a fact that his 22 Jump Street director reminded the world about with a social-media post praising the actor’s improvisational skills.
Christopher Miller, co-director of the 2014 comedy sequel—which stars Tatum and Jonah Hill as buddy-cops going undercover at a college in order to find the supplier of a new drug—took to X (formerly known as Twitter) to give a little behind-the-scenes insight into one of the movie’s most memorable moments. In the X post, the filmmaker revealed how an improv suggestion from Channing boosted the hilarity of the scene:
This scene was originally written to take place all in Dickson’s office but Channing said ‘If this happened, I would run all over the building telling everyone’ so we set up a bunch of cameras and let him do his thing
In the scene, Hill and Tatum’s characters, Schmidt and Jenko, are being reprimanded by their boss Captain Dickson, again portrayed by Ice Cube, after it’s revealed that the woman Schmidt has been seeing is Dickson’s own daughter, played by Amber Stevens.
Tatum’s doofus cop takes a second to put two-and-two together when he sees a picture of said daughter on Dickson’s desk. But when he figures out the connection between the characters, he takes off on a minute-long, expletive-laden jaunt around the entire building, high-fiving his fellow officers at his partner’s expense.
According to the director, that decision to move the action from inside Dickson’s glass office (it looks like an ice cube, get it?) to the greater law enforcement space was made by Tatum himself.
This scene was originally written to take place all in Dickson’s office but Channing said “If this happened, I would run all over the building telling everyone” so we set up a bunch of cameras and let him do his thing https://t.co/FQaG8823qSJanuary 3, 2024
It’s far from the first time that the performer has added some funny improvisations in a Channing Tatum movie. For his breakout role in She’s the Man, his co-star Amanda Bynes, herself a comedic icon, praised Tatum’s improv choices during a scene where his sweet-but-awkward jock Duke attempts to flirt with a flip phone. In an interview with IFilm, the actress revealed:
There’s a scene where we’re in the gym and it wasn’t even written that Channing would, like, open the phone funny and fall and be awkward, but he started becoming this guy. And that’s when I started being really impressed with him as an actor, he really went for it.
Tatum also held his own against another famously funny co-star, acting opposite an acerbically witty Sandra Bullock in 2022’s The Lost City, and reportedly threw in some ad-libs for that movie, too. Bullock revealed to Insider during the movie’s SXSW premiere that many of those improvisations didn’t end up making the film’s final edit, but only because the actress couldn’t stop breaking during the takes.
The directors had Channing ad-lib lines to us, and none of his lines were used because I was laughing so hard.
Calling Tatum “crazy funny,” Bullock also revealed that though the silly scrapped lines didn’t end up in The Lost City, the filmmakers did include many of them in the outtakes, including this nonsensical gem:
When the shepherd goes to pie, you eat it.
It looks like the moral of the story is, if you want to add a little extra funniness to your film, just let Channing Tatum do his thing. He can next be seen in Project Artemis, which opens July 12 on the 2024 movies schedule.