Fans who had been enamored with Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan's post-Step Up romance were devastated when the couple decided to call it quits in 2018. And now in a new interview with Vanity Fair, Channing's opening up about their "terrifying" divorce and what fatherhood has meant to him since then.
He and Jenna knew they'd been growing apart for a while
He told the magazine that they "fought really hard" for their marriage to work, but ultimately it just couldn't be saved — especially after they had become parents.
"I think we told ourselves a story when we were young, and we just kept telling ourselves that story, no matter how blatantly life was telling us that we were so different," he said. "But when you’re actually parents, you really understand differences between the two of you. Because it is screaming at you all day long. How you parent differently, how you look at the world, how you go through the world."
He called their divorce "super scary and terrifying"
"Your life just turns on its axis. This whole plan that you had literally just turns into sand and goes through your fingers and you’re just like, 'Oh, sh-t. What now?'" he said.
For a while, the back and forth between Jenna and Channing was brutal, and at one point, freshly after their split, Channing asked the court for a counselor to help them co-parent since they'd been experiencing so much "conflict."
Ultimately, it encouraged him to become a better person
"It was probably exactly what I needed. I don’t think I would’ve ever done the work, I think, on myself in the way that I had to do the work on myself to really try to figure out what next. And really, it just started with my daughter," he said. "I just dropped everything and just focused on her. And it was truly the best possible thing that I ever could have done. Because in the alone time that I have with just me and her, we’ve become best friends."
Now it sounds like the relationship between him and 9-year-old Everly is better than ever.
Having a daughter also changed the way he looks at the world
"Only in having a daughter did it start to really scare me how scary the world is for women," he said. "You can conceive it when you love someone that is a girl, but it doesn’t land in the same way as having a tiny female human in the world that is so vulnerable and looking at the world through rose-colored glasses."
This has led him to focus on female empowerment and equality in his projects — we know Everly will be so proud of him someday.
In the end, it seems like everything worked out for the best
Divorce is never easy, but Channing got through it and seems to be happier on the other side (especially now that he's dating Zoe Kravitz). Jenna seems happier too; she and husband Steve Kazee also have another child together, a 2-year-old son named Callum.
Single-dad life agrees with this guy, and it sounds like everything he's been through has only made him better for it.
