MTV Movies Blog caught up with GI Joe’s Duke himself Channing Tatum while the actor was promoting his upcoming film Fighting.
Apparently Channing really wanted to play none other than blade and machine gun wielding badass Snake Eyes, a role that wisely wound up going to the more qualified Ray Park. >[? “I wanted to play Snake Eyes,” laughed Tatum. “I wanted so badly to play Snake Eyes.”
Had he played Snake Eyes (yeah, right) there would have been no need to memorize lines despite the “mouth” sculpted into the character’s face mask. The script originally had Snake Eyes spewing out a line of dialogue in the closing frames until consultant and GI Joe long time expert Larry Hama put his foot down. “I think that the first and the one thing that he said was, ‘Okay, I’ll do this. But Snake Eyes can’t talk. No matter what, Snake Eyes can’t talk.’ At one point they had Snake Eyes saying one line or something like that at the end of the movie and he’s just like, ‘Never. Never in a million years. I’m never going to let that happen.’ So he doesn’t.”
Good for Larry, but it doesn’t look like he has much of a say when it came to wardrobe and costuming.
Lastly Tatum joins countless actors before him in sounding off on why he prefers working on a small budget flick with no effects versus a big effects-laden film like GI Joe.
“I haven’t seen it yet. Doing those films you have no idea. They’re over half digital.. I’d say almost 75% digital because you’re doing all this stuff, but the way they create the world is all in the computer. I knew what Fighting was going to be a thousand times more than GI Joe. You never know. You’re looking at a green screen and you’re sitting in a chair and you’re having to imagine that you’re flying around the arctic under the polar ice caps. You have no idea what that looks like so they just shout things like, ‘There’s an explosion to your right! There’s an explosion to your left! Someone’s shooting at you and you duck down!’ It’s like the grown-up version of make-believe.”
If only Stephen Sommers’ GI Joe looked more like a grown up version of the brand.
