Channing Tatum yanks at his knobby ear with a curious blend of pride and embarrassment.
“Cauliflower ear,” he says, matter-of-factly. “It doesn’t go away … but it’s a nice little take-away.”
Tatum could even say the battered head flaps and abused perichondrium are proof of true performance, because he suffered the auricle injury on the set of Foxcatcher, the latest film from Capote director Bennett Miller.
Based on the true story of billionaire heir John du Pont and his bid to coach a U.S. Olympic wrestling team, Foxcatcher stars Tatum as professional wrestler and gold medallist Mark Schultz, Mark Ruffalo as his older brother and fellow medallist Dave Schultz, as well as an unrecognizable Steve Carell as the eccentric du Pont.
For months, the three men were forced into strained intimacy in the pursuit of bringing the dark story to light, and in the case of Tatum and Ruffalo, that often meant mano a mano struggles to the mat, and all the ear-crushing trauma that goes along with it.
“Mark and I went through the grinder together,” says Tatum. “So it was pretty easy to bond when you are bleeding together.”
But there was another male-bonding dynamic to explore in Bennett’s coolly surreal picture, and it’s the way du Pont treated the younger Schultz as brother, child, friend and cabana boy.
At first, Tatum didn’t really know how to pin it down. In fact, when he first met with Miller seven years ago, he says he didn’t get the script at all.
“I read it and honestly, I didn’t understand why Bennett wanted to make this movie. I don’t think I had the tools to understand the nuance of the script or the characters or really anything, and thankfully, Bennett and I found each other on the Sony lot seven years after and I think we had both done a lot of growing, especially me,” says Tatum.
“When we started talking about it again I felt like I had new eyes into it, so I am so thankful I didn’t try to attempt it before because I wouldn’t have known where to start.”
Steve Carell plays John du Pont in a scene from Foxcatcher.
An eerie mix of absurdist humour and tragedy, Foxcatcher is positioned as a mournful love triangle between three quiet men all grappling with different concepts of love.
When Carell first saw the film at its premiere at Cannes earlier this year, he said he was surprised by the number of times people laughed. It’s an understandable response, he says, even if the film has an undeniably dark side.
“The way Bennett describes the humour is that it’s funny until it’s not anymore, and if this story didn’t have the outcome that it does, it could just be an absurd, ridiculous story,” says Carell.
“But the fact it ends up where it does, and that there’s this pall that hangs over the entire narrative, it changes things. But some of it is so absurd you can’t help but laugh, or want to laugh, because it seems too strange to be true,” says the comic actor who donned a prosthetic nose, dark contact lenses and a whole new screen presence to assume the role of a little rich man desperate for affirmation.
Asked about the phenomenon of male bonding, and its near-primal necessity in building a man’s personal identity, Tatum, Ruffalo and Carell reflect from slightly different perspectives.
“There was some du Ponding,” says Ruffalo. “But I think for a guy, it’s about security, probably, to some degree. It gives you a sense of place and self.”
Tatum laughs at the du Ponding joke, then articulates a seldom-voiced truth: “It’s really hard for men to tell other men ‘I love you’ without putting like a ‘man’ at the end of it — like ‘love you … man.’ You can’t just look at another man and say ‘I love you.’ ”
Carell says male bonding is important because “it’s about offering yourself up to vulnerability” and men don’t generally do that. He also says he did not really bond with his co-stars because he and Tatum had an unspoken agreement to stay away from each other on-set.
Their discomfort together is palpable, but it’s also a huge aspect of the subtext because no one really knew the truth of their characters’ relationship. Even Tatum, who spent time with the real Dave Schultz to prepare, says there was no consistency to the stories.
“Sometimes, I’d find talking to him so profound. And then at another moment, I would be so upside-down with something that he said that I wouldn’t be able to wrap my mind around it. It got sort of confusing at times.”
Steve Carell, left, and Mark Ruffalo in a scene from Foxcatcher.
Carell says the whole experience of the movie was slightly mysterious — including his own hire. “I was honestly surprised that (Miller) asked me to do it but just the fact that he asked was the reason why I did it.”
As for the larger mysteries of male bonding and John du Pont, Carell says he has no sure answers.
“There’s lots of conjecture (about the motives in the film) but who’s to say? There have been all sorts of whispers and we’ve all done research and talked to people who have opinions but really it’s just that: an opinion,” he says.
“But I think Bennett presents all those things in a very open way and allows the viewer to draw their own conclusion … But in a lot of cases, he was finding it as we were finding it and I think that’s an extremely exciting aspect of working like this.”
