See Channing Tatum living in a Toys ‘R’ Us in ‘Roofman’ first look

When Channing Tatum signed on to play real-life felon Jeffrey Manchester in Roofman, he thought it would be a break from some of the more taxing physical work he’s done in films.

That didn’t last long. “It was absolutely exhausting,” Tatum tells Entertainment Weekly for an exclusive first look at the movie, in theaters Oct. 10. “When I read this, I was like, ‘Oh, this isn’t an action movie. I’m not going to be exhausted by the end of the day.’ I’ve had to hit the ground every day on a movie before and your body hurts. But this was a spiritual marathon on some level.”

Though that’s not to say he didn’t also have some physically taxing sequences in the Derek Cianfrance-directed film, which is based on a true story. Tatum stars as Manchester, a convicted spree-robber dubbed “Roofman” for his tendency to access the properties he was robbing by drilling through their roofs. It’s a modus operandi we see recreated in the film, and it pushed Tatum to find his own physical ceiling.

“Derek really wanted me to break through the roof,” the actor explains. “Lots of times in movies, you’re trying to shave off every little unnecessary moment, so you can put in more story or action. Derek loves those in-between moments of like, ‘Oh, I can’t get this roof shingle off.’ It’s the struggle of the thing. He doesn’t want it to be nice and neat and carefully pre-planned, where it doesn’t look hard.”

It was a lesson Tatum learned in real-time. “I get there and I think I’m just dropping down to the ground or whatever, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, I was thinking that you would just fall through this roof.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, okay. Can I fall on [something] so I don’t have to do a 10-foot fall?’”

Tatum found Cianfrance’s approach as an invigorating (and utterly new) way of working. “There were no small scenes,” he explains. “Every scene was very, very, very important. Usually, there’s connective tissue where you’re like, ‘Okay, he’s just coming home and he’s going to put down his keys, sit down and watch TV.’ It feels very straightforward. There was nothing straightforward about any scene that we did. There was always a real exploration and finding of what the scene could be. That was really satisfying. At the end of the day, we knew we went everywhere that we possibly could.”

While the act of breaking in and out of roofs lends the film its title, the story is far more about Manchester’s life during a period of six months in 2004, where he lived under an alias, John Zorn, in a North Carolina community. After a daring jail break, Jeff holes up in the walls of a Toys “R” Us, emerging at night to explore the toy store. But when he falls for Leigh Wainscott (Kirsten Dunst), a divorced mom who happens to work at the toy store, he tries to build a new life until his past starts to catch up with them.

For her part, Dunst reiterates that sense of “spiritual marathon,” though more for Tatum than for herself. “[Channing] worked so hard on this film,” she tells EW. “I don’t think anyone’s seen him like this before.”

It’s not Tatum’s first dramatic role by any means (see: Foxcatcher, Dear John), nor is it his first time playing a character based on a real person. Something which he admittedly struggles with. “It’s impossible to tell someone’s real life story in 90 minutes,” he explains. “I’ve only played two other real people in my life, and it’s not very comfortable. I feel a lot of pressure. It gets muddy.”

Still, Tatum felt buoyed by the amount of access the production had to the real people involved in the case. Though he hasn’t had the opportunity to meet the real Manchester, who is currently serving a 40-year sentence in Central Prison in Raleigh, he has had extensive phone conversations with him.

“I really hope Jeff likes the movie,” says Tatum. “He’s made some bad decisions in his life. That is a fact. But he is probably the first one to tell you that. But I just find him such a beautiful and unfortunate soul. It breaks my heart; he’s so smart and alive, even on a phone call. The first time I ever talked to him, I was nervous, and he knew things about me and asked me about my life. He made things really easy.”

Dunst notes that the real Leigh Wainscott visited the set twice (though Dunst didn’t get the opportunity to speak with her) and that they filmed in many of the actual locations, most notably in the church where Wainscott and Manchester forged their bond with each other and their community.

“So many people in Jeff’s story are in the movie,” adds Tatum. “The real life preacher is in the movie. The guy that drove the truck that Jeff escaped in was in the movie. When you’re around some of these real people, all of a sudden it makes it very, very real. It puts pressure on you to pay attention.”

However, both Tatum and Dunst praise director Derek Cianfrance’s unique approach to filmmaking and the space he gives actors to play. “Derek came into my life at a very interesting point where I’d reached a different place in my craft,” says Tatum. “I didn’t really expect to go to the places that we did. Derek and I signed this soul contract.

“I don’t think I’ve been given the opportunity to do work like this,” he continues. “I’ve never been pushed as hard as Derek pushed me. We made a deal in the beginning that there was no unsafe place. We would do a take as it was written; we’d do a take that was silent; we would do a take like Jerry Lewis. We went all over the map and there was no wrong. That created a place of real vulnerability. It opened up a space to really sit in the loneliness of this character.”

Cianfrance also regularly arranged scenes and circumstances to help his actors achieve maximum authenticity. Most notably, he deliberately kept Dunst and Tatum apart until their first scene together. The actors had also never met previously. It not only made their first shared scene feel more genuine, but it helped Tatum overcome his nerves about working with Dunst.

“I was pretty intimidated to work with her,” he admits. “There’s nothing that she hasn’t done. I was very, very nervous and that did something to me, meeting her for the very first time and having those real nerves. And then there was a real release in a way, a real falling into her because she’s so loving, warm. and open. It really did something for me.”

Dunst recalls another instance where Cianfrance told her that her onscreen daughter, played by Lily Collias, didn’t know how to drive and sent Dunst to give Collias a driving lesson as a bonding opportunity. Collias went along with it, but Dunst found out later that Collias did, in fact, already know how to operate a motor vehicle.

“I love Derek for that,” Dunst says with a laugh. “He always wants to get the realest reaction and get all those little moments that he loves. He likes to mess a little bit with people, but in a way that’s positive in the aim of making something authentic.”

Tatum had much the same experience. “Derek set traps for me everywhere,” he says. “All he wanted to do was mess me up in a scene. We would block the scene, and he would look at what I was going to do, and then I would go out of the room and he would set these traps up.

“If I was going to make coffee, he would stick the cups together so I couldn’t get them open, and he would put the cup holders all the way across the room where they hadn’t been in the rehearsal, so I would have to genuinely look for them,” he continues. “He kept me guessing and kept me off my center. It’s amazing to have a plan, but you can get stuck in the rut of it sometimes.”

If Tatum was relishing being a bit unbalanced, Dunst was reveling in the opportunity to make some lighter fare. Two of her more recent films, Civil War and The Power of the Dog, are exceedingly dark and required her to go to some harrowing mental spaces. “On this one, I’m singing in the choir,” she says, a bubble of happiness clear in her voice. “This movie has a Christmas movie feeling to me. Sometimes I would do takes and think to myself, ‘Okay, remember, let’s do a Christmas movie take.’ Just because it gives a different sparkle and energy.”

That sparkle was particularly in play for Tatum during the overnight scenes in the Toys “R” Us. As seen in the exclusive photos, his character makes the most of being unleashed in a toy store — riding bikes up and down the aisles, donning inner tubes as outerwear, and more. All of which Tatum drew from his conversations with Manchester.

“Jeff, the stories that he would tell, it was like his playground,” he explains. “He had to keep his mind busy somehow. There’s so much that will be on the cutting room floor. They really built a Toys ‘R’ Us. You could shoot 360 degrees. It was so nostalgic to walk in. We had maybe a little too much fun in there.”

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For all the high jinks, the film still has a melancholy undertone, dealing with the consequences of Manchester’s actions and the lies he tells those around him. “We wanted the movie to be fun, yet still sad,” Tatum explains. “We had a word that was one of our secret words that meant sweet but sad, and it was a bit of an intention.”

Adds Dunst: “Not always do you get a movie that’s this genuine, which is so hard to do without being cheesy or manipulative. There’s none of that in this movie. It just makes you feel good, laugh, and cry.”

Roofman also stars Peter Dinklage as the Toys “R” Us manager, Juno Temple and LaKeith Stanfield as Manchester’s friends, and Uzo Aduba and Ben Mendelsohn.