Channing Tatum: I Have Never Considered Myself a Very Smart Person

Channing Tatum bares his insane arm muscles on the cover of T magazine’s latest issue.

Here’s what the 34-year-old Foxcatcher star had to share with the mag:

On doing poorly in school because of ADHD and dyslexia: “I have never considered myself a very smart person, for a lot of reasons. Not having early success on that one path messes with you. You get lumped in classes with kids with autism and Down Syndrome, and you look around and say, Okay, so this is where I’m at. Or you get put in the typical classes and you say, All right, I’m obviously not like these kids either. So you’re kind of nowhere. You’re just different. The system is broken. If we can streamline a multibillion-dollar company, we should be able to help kids who struggle the way I did.”

On being a father: “You notice your behavior, like, Wow, I don’t have much patience right now. Why is that? You spend the day watching this thing constantly taking in information, and you have to be sure you’re making that happen. At the end of the day when I put her to bed, I feel glad to have some peace but say to myself, That was so much fun.”

On playing real person Mark Schultz in Foxcatcher: “It felt like a sensitive situation because Mark Schultz really wanted me to get everything correct. In a two-hour movie I’m never going to be able to show everything about a person, but I tried to grasp the most poignant things and to imbue them into the film. Mark didn’t expect to like it, though it turned out that he did. He was just hoping he’d be relieved, and I think maybe he wanted to get some justice. I’m not sure it’s full enough of that stuff for him – all the stuff that people did to him, terrible, terrible things. The movie doesn’t do that. It shows these relationships that are complicated and beautiful and horrible.”

For more from Channing, visit T Magazine! Bigger cover inside…