Channing Tatum can’t recall the first scene he and Scarlett Johansson filmed together for “Fly Me to the Moon.” He does, however, remember where they first met: at a table read for the romantic comedy.
Although Tatum and Johansson were both involved in the films “Don Jon” and “Hail, Caeser!,” the two actors “never crossed paths,” as Tatum puts it, until “Fly Me to the Moon.”
“I remember us going down right after the table read to go into hair and makeup and start to try to figure out our look for the movie — it’s period and everything — and she was trying to figure out her wig for the movie,” Tatum told Variety at the “Fly Me to the Moon” premiere in New York City on Monday night. “I just immediately started making fun of her wig. I was like, you’re gonna wear that? Is that like a thing that they used to do back then? Wear raccoons on their head? And she’s like, ‘Shut up!’ She’s like, ‘Not now!'”
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“I think it really set the tone for us in general, like, just us as even friends, much less the characters, you know?” Tatum said, adding that Johansson is “the force in the movie and she’s a force in this life as well.”
Johansson described Tatum’s qualities that made him the ideal leading man for “Fly Me to the Moon.” “He’s obviously that very handsome leading man, but he has a humility about him and about his performances that is so unique,” Johansson told Variety. “He can laugh at himself and he doesn’t take himself too seriously, and those qualities are all baked into the character, too.”
Set during the 1960s Space Race, “Fly Me to the Moon” follows the relationship between Cole Davis (Tatum), the NASA director in charge of Apollo 11’s launch, and Kelly Jones (Johansson), a marketing specialist who is hired to “sell the moon” to America and eventually must stage a fake moon landing in case the mission fails. Jim Rash, Ray Romano, Anna Garcia, Donald Elise Watkins, Noah Robbins, Colin Woodell, Nick Dillenburg, Christian Zuber and Woody Harrelson round out the cast.
Robbins, who plays NASA engineer Don Harper, said an engineer who worked in the Apollo Mission Control Center in 1969 was on set while they were filming the firing room scenes.
“He was this sage, wise man who obviously had been a part of history in this pivotal moment,” Robbins said. “And he was so available, both for his knowledge and for his, like, humanity.”
Several scenes from “Fly Me to the Moon” were also shot on location at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Fla.
“We got to go to the roof of one of the biggest buildings [by volume] in the world and watch an actual launch, because they were launching rockets all the time for this new program,” Tatum recalled. “I was like, this is really nuts. Even to be on the roof was enough, so it was really cool.”
“Fly Me to the Moon” lands in theaters Friday.
See more photos from the premiere below.
