Channing Tatum & Kirsten Dunst Are Grown-Ups Now (Even When They Don’t Want to Be)
The millennial darling ‘Roofman’ stars on their underrated Oscar dark horse. Plus: The busiest week of awards season is here, and I have you covered
Happy Monday — Cyber Monday? Are we still doing that? — and welcome to the busiest two-week stretch of awards season by far. This is the part where we start seeing some nominees and winners, so at last everyone gets to participate!
Tonight, the Gotham Awards will be held in New York, where, in addition to the competitive categories, tribute awards will be handed out for the talent behind Frankenstein, Sinners, Jay Kelly, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Hedda, After the Hunt and Song Sung Blue. Even if the Gotham winners don’t necessarily port over to the rest of awards season — last year’s best feature winner, A Different Man, received just a single Oscar nomination, for its hair and makeup work — it’s something close to an East Coast version of the Governors Awards. Basically, it’s an opportunity to see a whole lot of famous people work the room at the same time.
My colleague Christopher Rosen will be there to watch it all unfold, and we’ll go live on Substack tomorrow at 9 a.m. ET to discuss both the Gotham Awards and my big plans tonight: seeing Avatar: Fire and Ash at one of its first press and industry screenings. Our conversation will also be on this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast, but if you’re up early, please join us in the comments! If you weren’t keeping a close eye on the podcast feed over the weekend, you may have missed the first of several bonus Saturday interviews we’ll be sharing, with Dwayne Johnson kicking things off to talk about The Smashing Machine. If it’s a busy part of awards season, you’d better believe the podcast will be busy, too.
We’ll be back on Substack Live on Friday as well, this time joined by our returning, beloved Joyce Eng to break down the other big awards news of the week: the TV and film nominations from the Critics Choice Awards. Look for a link to that conversation in Thursday’s newsletter. But if you can’t join us live, the replay will be available only to paid Prestige Junkie After Party subscribers. Just $5 a month will get you access to that, my recent Avatar flashback episode with Griffin Newman, our explanation of how the NFL and Oscar season are basically the same and so much more. Don’t miss out!
The days ahead stay wild: On Tuesday, the New York Film Critics Circle will announce its winners, Wednesday brings the Film Independent Spirit Awards nominations and the National Board of Review winners and Sunday is the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s time to shine. Next week are the Golden Globe Award nominations and the start of Oscar shortlist voting. The following week is the start of voting for the Producers Guild Awards, Directors Guild Awards and Screen Actors Guild Awards (excuse me, the Actor Awards) — plus the announcement of the Oscar shortlists in categories such as score, song, international feature and more. So, much to do before Hollywood hunkers down for the holidays, and Oscar voters, hopefully, really get cracking on those FYC screeners! Between this newsletter and the podcast, there will be a whole lot to talk about between now and Christmas. Thanks for being along for the ride!
Turkey Leftovers
Before I get to today’s conversation with Roofman co-stars and millennial icons Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst, let me share the text I received early on Thanksgiving morning from the intrepid Chris Rosen: “Thanksgiving parade Oscar campaign in full effect.”
I had already posted as much on Bluesky, marveling at seeing Cynthia Erivo open the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade and make it look effortless despite the exhausting Wicked: For Good press tour she’d just wrapped up. There was One Battle After Another star and best supporting actress contender Teyana Taylor performing her 2020 song “Made It” on the float sponsored by Peacock. And, still a significant event even months after KPop Demon Hunters conquered the world, the Huntri/x trio of EJAE, Rei Ami and Audrey Nuna performed “Golden” on live television for the first time. (In my house full of children under 10, it was an event worth sitting through endless rounds of commercial breaks.)
Naturally, I wish that more Oscar contenders would go this full-bore into the parade — if we can have a Derpy Tiger balloon, why not the actual Marty Supreme orange blimp flying overhead, or a float paying tribute to the medicinal herbs of Hamnet? But mostly this felt like confirmation that we’re in for an especially populist awards season, with multiple contenders so widely known they can be headliners at one of the most mainstream TV events of the year. Oscar telecast producers eternally in search of higher ratings can probably take heart from the numbers for this year’s parade — and ideally find a way also to incorporate the Saja Boys from KPop Demon Hunters, to boost those numbers a bit higher.
Raise the Roofman
One of the most endearing and surprising things about Roofman, the Paramount release from earlier this fall, is how hard it is to define its tone. It’s competing at the Golden Globes as a comedy, and its posters feature star Channing Tatum wearing a pink pool float around his waist and an enormous teddy bear on his shoulders. That happens in the movie, sure, but so do several emotionally fraught robberies, painful breakups and a transcendently sad scene with a church choir.
Being that bittersweet is tough for any movie to pull off, and it felt particularly surprising coming from director Derek Cianfrance, whose films Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines, and the TV series I Know This Much Is True, all leaned even more heavily into tragedy. So when I caught up with Tatum and co-star Kirsten Dunst a few weeks ago, I wanted to ask how Cianfrance helped them see his vision, which turns a weird-but-true premise — an escaped convict named Jeffrey Manchester hides out in a Toys “R” Us and sparks a romance with a woman who works there — into something genuinely heartfelt.
As it turns out, that delicate tone took them by surprise as well. As Tatum and Dunst tell it, they put their faith in Cianfrance and let the rest follow. “Derek loves performance,” Tatum, 45, told me, with Dunst, 43, sitting by his side, doing a fresh round of press together months after the Paramount film had opened (Roofman is available to rent now at various digital platforms). Encouraging his actors to change up their performances from take to take, Cianfrance “has about seven different movies in the can,” Tatum continues. “He could make a full-on comedy, or there’s an even darker version that would just break your heart. I looked at him so many times like, ‘I have no idea how you’re going to go into a dark room with all this footage and all the different stuff that we did and carve out what the tone of this movie is going to be.’”
Dunst remembers filming the emotional final scene between her character, Leigh, and Tatum’s, after their short-lived but sweet romance had run its course. Leigh might have plenty of reasons to hate Jeffrey — he’s lied both to her and her two daughters, not only about living in the Toys “R” Us but also about his past as the armed robber nicknamed “the Roofman.” But the scene is much more about Leigh extending him grace, and a shared gratitude for what they shared. If you’re an actor filming it the traditional way, with the camera capturing one actor’s side of the scene, then switching places to focus on the other, it’s the kind of thing that’s hard to do twice.
Instead, Cianfrance set up two cameras and let his actors cook. “A lot of directors wouldn’t sacrifice the shot to shoot us both at the same time,” Dunst says. “He knows the most important, valuable thing is the authenticity of the performance. He likes the feeling of life rather than anything stilted or performative, and that’s the kind of acting that I like.”
As my colleague Richard Rushfield has so convincingly argued, Dunst has a better track record for working with great directors than basically any other actor alive, including Oscar winners Barry Levinson, Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola. Tatum has worked with his share of greats as well (Oscar winners Steven Soderbergh, Joel and Ethan Coen and Quentin Tarantino), but has still rarely gotten the chance to explore the level of nuance and well-earned emotional depth that are key to Roofman. You can hear how special it was in the way Tatum talks about Cianfrance, but also the way he talks about his character, whose penchant for telling himself stories and adopting new identities doesn’t make him sound all that different from an actor.
“He was telling himself a fantasy to justify whatever his behavior wanted to be,” Tatum says of Manchester, who in real life has been back in prison since the events depicted in Roofman. “I think I’ve definitely done that in my life. I think everybody tells themselves stories. I’m a different person now with you than I am with my daughter. We all wear masks.”
Living out a child’s fantasy of sleeping in a toy store and eating nothing but candy, Roofman’s Manchester represents an extreme kind of arrested development. But what 40-something hasn’t found themselves shocked at being the adult in the room? As our conversation wrapped up, I asked Dunst if she related to what Tatum told Variety a few months ago — “In my mind, I’m still literally 30 years old — 26, if I’m being honest.”
Dunst replied that her job as an actor is to keep her “childlike qualities at the forefront,” and she prides herself on being a “fun mom” to the boys she shares with her husband, Jesse Plemons. “Sometimes the school calls me, and I want to laugh,” she says. “That’s when I’m like, oh, this person’s acting very adult with me, so I’m going to pretend to be very adult now.”
When I told them I had to end our call so I could make it to a school board meeting, Dunst gave me a crisp salute — from one so-called adult to another.
