Channing Tatum

Step Up (2006) put his face on posters, but Magic Mike (2012) is what actually made him. He had spent eight months stripping at a Tampa nightclub at 18, and in 2010 he convinced Steven Soderbergh to turn those eight months into a movie, with Soderbergh putting his own money in alongside Tatum. The gamble paid off: $7 million budget, around $167 million worldwide. He went from the 'hot guy in action movies' category to something more specific: the rare male star who built his brand on self-deprecation about his own past.

The Magic Mike empire became a legal problem after the marriage ended. He and Jenna Dewan spent years fighting over the franchise profits, the divorce dragging through six years of proceedings before everything settled in September 2024. His engagement to Zoë Kravitz, who directed him in Blink Twice, ended weeks later. The career turn is more interesting than any of that: Blink Twice (2024) cast him against type as a menacing tech billionaire, and Roofman (2025) earned him some of the best reviews of his career. He's building an actual filmography at 44.

He turned down a college football scholarship to move to Tampa, which led to cleaning animal cages, telemarketing for a mortgage company, and eventually stripping under the stage name 'Chan Crawford' at a local nightclub. A video from those nights landed in Us Weekly in 2009, right as he was becoming famous. Not many actors have seen their most embarrassing old job gross around $167 million at the box office, and then become the most contested asset in their divorce settlement.