Channing Tatum went straight to the source to prepare for his titular role in Roofman.
Though he’s currently in prison for his crimes (spoiler alert), the real-life Roofman, Jeffrey Manchester, made himself available to Tatum and the film’s director and co-writer, Derek Cianfrance, for hundreds of hours of conversation.
“Man, we talked about so much,” Tatum tells Entertainment Weekly of those discussions. “I think in the beginning, I obviously had lists and lists of questions about the whys and the hows, and did this really happen? Did that really happen?”
The film tells the unbelievable true story of how Manchester, dubbed Roofman in the press for his penchant for robbing McDonald’s restaurants by cutting holes in the roofs, escaped prison and spent months secretly living in a Toys “R” Us.
When talking to Manchester, Tatum says it was important to him that it be a conversation, and not just him “grilling” the subject. “‘I want you to just feel free. You can ask me anything. I’m an open book, man. I’ll tell you anything you want to know,'” Tatum recalls telling Manchester.
Then, Tatum had a breakthrough when Manchester revealed “one of the most heartbreaking things” that the actor says “really did inform me about a lot of who he is as a human.”
“He’s obviously a very, very complex, multidimensional human; I think we all are,” Tatum says. “He’s not the hero. He is not the villain. He’s just a human. He’s made some bad decisions, and he’s very, very aware of that and having to pay the price for that. But I asked him, when he gets out, what are you going to do? And it really just punched me in the gut, man. He’s like, ‘I don’t know if they’ll ever let me, because I’m a felon, but I would love to adopt, and I would love to have a second chance of being a father and not screwing it up this time.'”
Tatum continues, “He really knows. He’s like, ‘The thing that I cheated [my kids] out of is just my actual presence in their life. And I just didn’t understand before this, I had to be taught a lesson, and you can’t take those decisions back.’ He’s dealing with those consequences in that reality, and it’s a hard thing to swallow.”
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Cianfrance says he really wanted to take it a step further and try to shoot some of the film at Manchester’s prison, but he wasn’t allowed to. “He lives in, or he’s housed in, such a very stringent maximum security prison, probably because he’s broken out of prison so many times,” Ciancfrance says with a smirk, adding, “So, the real Jeff has spent nine years in solitary confinement.”
And, apparently, he really, really wants an orange. “One time, I said, ‘What do you miss most about the outside world?'” Cianfrance says. “And he said, ‘An orange.’ And I said, ‘Wait up. What do you mean an orange?’ And he was like, ‘Well, a prisoner 20 years ago made orange wine out of an orange. And the warden basically said no more oranges.’ And so I tried to get him an orange and I couldn’t get him an orange, and I couldn’t bring a film crew in to shoot with him, although I really, really wanted to.”
Davi Russo/Paramount
So, will Manchester get a chance to see the film he was so instrumental in making? Cianfrance says he hasn’t seen it yet, but has seen clips and the poster and “seems very excited” by it all.
For his part, Tatum says he doesn’t know if or when Manchester will see the film, but he really hopes he does. “I do know that he does have some device to watch things on, but it’s very limited, and he doesn’t exactly get to pick. I’m hoping and praying that they let him see this movie. I don’t know. I’m pretty sure this movie’s not going to make the prison people happy, more than likely,” he says, laughing.
“But,” he says, “I hope they give him a second chance to at least see the movie and then hopefully it gives a little perspective on him, and why he did what he did, and maybe it shaves some time off his sentence, but who knows?”
Also starring Kirsten Dunst, Peter Dinklage, Juno Temple, LaKeith Stanfield, Ben Mendelsohn, and Uzo Aduba, Roofman is now in theaters.
