Channing Tatum Still Wishes He Got to Do ‘Beauty & the Beast’ With Guillermo del Toro

Channing Tatum has had a varied career. He has played spies, superheroes, and soft-hearted men (he also dances really well). But there is one role he wished he could play, but it got away: Tatum really, really wanted to play The Beast in a non-Disney version of Beauty & the Beast.

Speaking to Vanity Fair, Tatum said he had been approached about a possible film adaptation of the childhood classic by Guillermo del Toro. The actor turned down the role, a decision he described as “one of the biggest mistakes of my career.”

Tatum is a massive fan of del Toro’s work, but at the time, his then-wife Jenna Dewan had just given birth to their daughter, and he was already engaged “on a movie that was absolutely killing me, and the script wasn’t totally there yet. I was just in a place in my head that I was like, ‘I don’t think I can do this right now.’”

If you’re wondering what the heck happened to a del Toro-directed Beauty & the Beast, let us remind you that the auteur behind Pan’s Labyrinth and the upcoming movie Frankenstein was in the early 2010s attached to a Beauty & the Beast movie for Warner Bros., which, funnily enough, would’ve also starred Emma Watson as Belle.

Del Toro ended up leaving the projectin 2014, and there’s been no real word on it since—perhaps because, as Tatum told Vanity Fair, del Toro “[has] a billion things he wants to do. He’s such a creator. I’ll probably never forgive myself on that one, but I hope we get to work together one day.”

Certainly we have no idea what del Toro may be working on after Frankenstein hits Netflx in November. As for Tatum, he’s now working on Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars, as well as the thriller Josephine, so it’s still possible that the stars could align for the two men to team up on something and fulfill Tatum’s dreams.

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