Tatum plays Shawn MacArthur, a hustler who winds up using his fists to make big money. Shawn's a tough guy who knows how to handle himself, but he's also got a good heart and treats women well. Asked how difficult it was to balance the tough guy with the nice guy, Tatum replied, "I’m from the South. If I didn’t open up the door for my mom or my sister, I got slapped in the back of the head. That got fixed real quick. I was not about to not do that."
That helped him find the more gentlemanly side of Shawn. "Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s what Dito really wanted. I remember, they came to Dito and they told him he couldn’t cuss in the movie. Dito was just like, 'You want me to do an underground fighting movie on a PG-13? I can’t do it. I’m going to go think about it tonight. If I can’t wrap my head around it, then you have to find somebody else to do it.' We were way down the line on the movie. They waited to tell us that. Then we talked about it. It was really his idea. He was like, 'Look, no, Shawn just chooses not to cuss. That’s just his upbringing. He went to church. He doesn’t cuss because he chooses to. Harvey’s the same way. He’s old fashioned.'"
'Harvey', the street-wise manipulator who manages Shawn's fighting career, is played by Oscar nominated actor Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow). And Tatum described his working with relationship with Howard as "love-love." "I’ve loved watching that guy act since I can remember seeing him in films. It was way before I was even acting or even had any plan to act. Then I met him at Sundance and he had seen Saints. He had all these amazing things to say about Saints and about my performance in it. It literally welled me up because it was the first time that I had a real actor, someone that I really thought of as a great actor, tell me that he liked my work and I just almost couldn’t take it. And then he’s like, 'I want to do something someday so let’s keep each other in mind.' And I was just like, 'Uh, heh, yeah.' Then he loved Dito so we were always sort of just on the lookout for something. As soon as we just really got to sit and hang out, the guy is like a big brother now," said Tatum.
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Fighting hits theaters on April 24, 2009.
