Amanda Bynes Reveals How Channing Tatum Ended up in ‘She’s the Man’

Amanda Bynes may have steered the course of modern movies as we know them, as she claims she fought to get Channing Tatum his role in She’s The Man.

Tatum had just a couple of roles under his belt before starring opposite Bynes in She’s The Man back in 2006. However, the movie preceded Step Up, and some would argue that it launched his career. In her new tell-all interview with Paper Magazine, Bynes said that she was responsible for that casting choice.

“I totally fought for Channing [to get cast in] that movie because he wasn’t famous yet,” Bynes remembered. “He’d just done a Mountain Dew commercial and I was like, ‘This guy’s a star — every girl will love him!’”

Bynes said that she got some push-back on Tatum, who was 26 years old at the time. However, she believed that he would be a star and, even more presciently, knew that he could pass for a much younger man — even a student.

“[The producers] were like, ‘He’s so much older than all of you!’” Bynes remembered, “And I was like, ‘It doesn’t matter! Trust me!’”

Taking that stand clearly paid off, especially for Tatum. At the time, the young actor had appeared in music videos for Ricky Martin and Sean Paul, had a role on CSI: Miami and an uncredited appearance in 2005’s War of the Worlds. He had also taken roles in three movies, some of them with A-list casts, but there is no doubt that She’s The Man is where he made his mark on many young viewers at the time.

While She’s The Man was a net gain for Tatum, Bynes said that it actually left her with quite a wound for a while. She said that filming the movie in costume as a boy was “an interesting experience,” but afterwards it messed with her self-image.

“I went into a deep depression for 4-6 months because I didn’t like how I looked when I was a boy,” she said. “I’ve never told anyone that.”

Bynes added that it had mostly to do with the short hair and sideburns she wore for the movie, which she sad was “a super strange and out-of-body experience. It just really put me into a funk.”

Bynes shared this and many other stories with Paper this week. The actress turned social media pariah reflected on her antics earlier in this decade, which the tabloids could not get enough of. She admitted that the public break down had a lot to do with her own mental health and substance abuse battles. Happily, she is now feeling better.

“I’ve been sober for almost four years now,” Bynes said.

“I have no fear of the future,” she added later. “I’ve been through the worst and came out the other end and survived it so I just feel like it’s only up from here.”