Wait, what?! Channing Tatum and Shia LaBeouf once got drunk together, vandalized a store, and acted like "young dumb idiot actors," Tatum recently revealed in an extended interview with GQ.
It all went down in 2006, when LaBeouf and Tatum were cast opposite one another in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints; the drama's director, Dito Montiel, instructed the actors to bond. They obliged by engaging in a wild, debaucherous evening.
LaBeouf was first to reveal the pair's crazy night, telling GQ back in 2008: "Channing was supposed to be the head honcho in the movie, so he goes, 'All right, you see that bookstore? Somebody throw a rock. Let's break in and steal a Spider-Man bookmark.' And Peter [Tambakis] and me look at each other like, 'Dude, what? Are you f–king kidding me?'" LaBeouf went on to say Tatum then broke a glass window, and set off the security system. "He grabs the bookmarks and jets, So now you got these little actor kids running down the street in New York, freaking out."
However, the 22 Jump Street actor now tells GQ LaBeouf's story wasn't entirely accurate—but parts are true.
"Me and Shia, I think we had just met that day," the 34-year-old clarifies. "We were, like, 'What shall we go out and do?' We were drinking. And I think our initial thing was 'Alright, let's go out and try and get in a fight!' This was just young, dumb idiot actors thinking that that's going to bond us. Because we'll shed blood together, blah, blah, blah. I've never seen him since then."
So what kind of trouble did the pair actually get up to? "I definitely kicked in a window that night," the Magic Mike star admits. "But it wasn't Barnes and Nobles. Just a window. We were just running and being hoodlums and throwing trash bags down streets and just being stupid."
"We were trying to be like '80s hoodlums," the actor and father to 11-month-old daughter Everly adds. "And I think as we were running I kicked this thing, not thinking that it would ever shatter. And everything just went raining down. And I was like, 'Oh, s–t.' And then we just took off running. We all split up. I think Shia even punched a cop car—we weren't even sure if the cop was in the car, he punched the window of a cop car. It was pandemonium. It was just one of those nights that the volume just keeps getting turned up, turned up, turned up. And we all split up. We all just ran in opposite directions. I didn't hide under a car, I dove in some trash bags: 'I'm sitting here for a little while.'"
Now looking back on the random evening, Tatum laughs: "In hindsight it's the funniest thing in the world—just typical actors trying too hard. It's only fun because we didn't get caught…that I can have perspective on it now and know it was stupid. I don't think we were thinking."
Tatum and LaBeouf—who has made a slew of bizarre headlines over the past couple years—have since lost touch. "The kid's an incredible actor," Tatum says, "I just wish he would just act. Just act, man!"
