US actor Channing Tatum said he originally thought Zoe Kravitz was “one of the cooler, more just fascinating creators out there” – before signing on to star in her directorial debut Blink Twice.
Magic Mike star Tatum and The Batman actress Kravitz appeared to publicly debut their engagement in March, flashing her diamond ring during a Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony for her father, musician Lenny Kravitz.
The engagement came after the pair grew close on the set of Blink Twice, which sees Tatum play tech billionaire Slater King opposite British actress Naomi Ackie – who plays a cocktail waitress named Frida.
The thriller follows Frida as she is invited to join Slater and his friends for a holiday on his private island.
After reading the original script, co-written by Kravitz, Tatum told the PA news agency: “I just wanted to kind of get to know her”, while on the red carpet for the film’s European premiere in London.
“I actually thought she was sending me something for us to act together that she was going to produce,” the 44-year-old said, of first receiving the script from Kravitz.
“I’m not even sure if she said it in our first meeting, but I got the feeling, I was like: ‘Ooh, I think she might be wanting to direct this.’
“For another year-and-a-half after that (she) kept grinding, the movie now is very different than the script that I read back in the day.
“I just liked her as an actress, and thought she was one of the cooler, more just fascinating creators out there, and she’s just cool, man.”
Tatum said he had never played a part “where I just completely didn’t relate to the person at all”, referencing his tech tycoon character who is shrouded in controversy.
“I usually always pull something from my actual personal life and thread my way in,” he told PA.
“There really wasn’t very much here so I had to just create something completely and utterly… I’m not going say out of the random, because it wasn’t random, but it was dark and deep.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever tell anyone the full extent of where I went to create Slater.”
Meanwhile, Kravitz said the film was born from “a series of emotions that I didn’t really know what to do with”.
“I think based off of experiences, both for myself and friends and things I’ve read and a lot of rage really, and I didn’t know where to put it – so I started to write, and it was the birth of this story,” the 35-year-old told PA.
“I felt like there are so many things that women have to do or are expected to do, it has become so normalised that we don’t even speak about them.
“And so I really wanted to find a way to explore the complexity and the absurdity of that.”
Ackie, who played music star Whitney Houston in her 2022 biopic, described Blink Twice as a “fight against patriarchy”.
“It’s about honesty, it’s about our experience,” the 31-year-old said.
“It speaks to people, and whoever feels connected by this, you don’t have to be a woman, but it’s really about talking on things that are not questioned, and exploding it into a really big kind of metaphor, where people can then come away and then think, how does this apply to my own life.”
Ackie said her and Tatum “talked a lot” going into the project.
“The most important thing was to create a safe space for us to perform, but also a safe space for us to talk about things that bothered us and our experience and how we could come together to make this – so it was a real collaboration,” she added.