How Did Channing Tatum Make His Young ‘Josephine’ Co-Star Feel Comfortable? Getting Manicures Together

At the center of Beth de Araújo’s staggering Sundance premiere (and bona fide festival smash hit) “Josephine,” there is a first-time child performance for the ages. In her very first on-screen role, young Mason Reeves offers up a nuanced, brave, and deeply intuitive performance as the titular character, an eight-year-old San Francisco resident who witnesses a horrific crime and has to deal with the emotional fallout.

She’s supported by a pair of major stars, with Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan cast as her parents, who have very different reactions to how to handle what their young daughter is going through. After stunning festival audiences during the first weekend of the festival, the foursome stopped by the IndieWire Studio, presented by Dropbox, to talk about the genesis of the film and something essential: how they all made their young star feel comfortable with heavy material.

De Araújo and her casting director cast a wide net to find Josephine, and ultimately discovered Reeves at a local farmers market in San Francisco, near where the filmmaker herself grew up (and, as she explains in the video above, experienced something very much like her on-screen avatar).

Tatum and Chan were already cast in the film when Reeves came on board, and making sure she felt safe in their presence was top of mind for everyone. For Tatum, a little bonding session went a long way.

Asked how he first bonded with Reeves, Tatum responded with a laugh. “We went and got our nails did. That was my first thing. I do that with my daughter. It was really important to me, having a kid … I wasn’t sure how much that she was going to understand about some of the deeper themes of this story, and I hadn’t had real extensive conversations of how some of the things were going to be shot.”

He continued, “I talked to her parents a lot about, how were we all going to do it? And, really, it came down to, I just wanted to play as much with Mason as I could, and for her to be really clear. And I was probably almost too annoying with it, and being like, ‘Hey, you know like when I am yelling at you right now, this is not me, right? I’m still your friend, right? And you’re not mad at me for yelling.'”

Next to him, rising star Reeves laughed and smiled. Oh, Channing!

For Tatum, who has his own young daughter, the film felt particularly important to make, because he related to it on so many levels. “When I read the script, I found a lot hitting home, as far as my own childhood and my dad,” he said. “And as I kept, I guess, ruminating with it and sitting with it, the lines were blurring with how I was raising my kid. … I was really trying to figure out where I lived inside of this really hard story. … The harder things are to look at are maybe the reasons to look at them, the deeper reasons, and the more important they are to actually make [them].”

Watch the complete conversation with the “Josephine” team in the video above.

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