Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams in ‘The Vow’

MANILA, Philippines - Before he plunged into acting, former model Channing Tatum was told by his acting coach, “It’s going to take you ten years to even be good at this.” As such, he has described his career transition—from the time he had his breakout role in “Step Up” in 2006, to his appearances on “G.I. Joe” and “Public Enemies” (where he co-starred with no less than Christian Bale and Johnny Deep)—as something “like crawling… you know, then walking and… I think I’m still walking,” he says with a laugh.

But in his eight years of acting, there’s no denying that Tatum is a charmer, especially on screen, with his last romantic lead appearance opposite Amanda Seyfried (“Mamma Mia”) in the movie adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ novel “Dear John” even being described as “smoldering.” Well, he will smolder some more and eventually melt more hearts in his latest movie, “The Vow.”

In “The Vow,” Tatum plays Leo, a man whose life becomes complicated after his wife of five years, Paige (Rachel McAdams), gets in a car accident and wakes up from a coma with severe memory loss and, thus, no recollection of her own husband or her feelings for him. The story is apparently based on what happened to real-life couple Kim and Krickitt Carpenter.

Tatum notes, “It’s exactly what happened [to the couple] in real life. I think she lost almost five years of her memory.  But they toughed it out.” And while he only met the couple in the middle of filming, Tatum points out, “The circumstances, like I said, really happened. They did get in a car accident and she did lose her memory. But everything else was made up. So I didn’t really feel the need to go and ask a bunch of questions [when I met them]. I kind of wanted to be able to create a different character and not try to be him.”

If playing a romantic lead has met unanimous approval from his growing fan base, Tatum himself wasn’t exactly sold on the part, at least not initially. “I was a bit stand-offish in the beginning because I really didn’t know who was going to play the other part… I knew we had to have someone who was just innately loveable for it to work. That you’d love to just love her.”

McAdams signing up for the part definitely brought him on board. “I was definitely down. Rachel is truly one of the most magically charismatic people I’ve ever met. We all know how good she is as an actress. But you also just innately care about her, because she’s such a sweetheart. You can sense that she’s just a good person, kind of fragile but yet strong at the same time – there’s a power in her. She’s just sort of all around perfect. It makes me sick a little bit actually,” he shares, laughing.

The thing about relationship movies is that the actors also have a lot to draw from. Tatum is, himself, a married man (“and totally in love with my wife [actress Jenna Dewan],” he shares) so a lot of the nuances of his character come from things he has experienced. “I mean, there’s a thousand things in the movie that are in my real relationship,” he says.

“But I also wanted to show a real person swallowing so much frustration and pain and doing it fairly, honestly, and, at times, breaking. Because I think that’s what would happen in real life. That’s if you’re as good a guy as Leo is, and I don’t think I would be. I don’t know if a lot of people would be.”

The movie has also called for Tatum to fall back on his previous experiences, especially in doing the nude scene. “Actually, that was fun,” he says without a trace of self-consciousness.

“No, I’m not modest. I don’t know why. I guess growing up doing the stuff that I was doing… You know, even in modeling. You’re just constantly sort of naked on photo-shoots and stuff all the time. It doesn’t really bother me.” Perhaps being a dancer also helped; as did his being a former stripper, something he even poked fun at during his hosting stint for “Saturday Night Live.”

“I didn’t even know that we were going to do [the scene] as nude as we did it. But it was hilarious,” he recalls.

And it seems his description of himself as “a little more hyper and crazy” than his onscreen character is pretty accurate because he also reveals, “I also got Rachel with a joke, too. I got props to make me a prosthetic. You don’t see it, but it’s like down to my calf,” he says with much amusement. “So her reaction was a real one,” he adds, laughing. “And I didn’t know we were doing that walk-away butt shot either, that’s for sure.”

So it seems there will be more to love about Channing Tatum in “The Vow,” which opens in local cinemas on Feb. 10.