Blink Twice’s Channing Tatum Says Zoë Kravitz Was Always Meant to Be a Director

During a recent press day for the film Blink Twice, I ask Channing Tatum what it was like to work with director Zoë Kravitz — which leads to a slightly awkward moment of laughter, as Tatum and Kravitz have been publicly dating since 2021. “It was okay, it was alright,” he says at first, with no shortage of dryness.

Then, however, he offers up some real insight on the Mad Max: Fury Road and The Batman star’s path to the director’s chair. “She’s obsessed with stories in movies — specifically movies. Like, we don’t do very much other than just watch movies. To get to be around someone that is so in love with it, that it consumes their whole life… It is who they are. This isn’t just like, ‘Oh, I want to see if I can direct a movie.’ This has always been the plan.”

He pauses, then, to correct himself. “I don’t even know if it was a plan. I think it was just something that she had to admit — that this is always what she was supposed to do. Because she loves it that much.”

Blink Twice, directed by Kravitz and written by Kravitz and E.T. Feigenbaum, begins when two struggling cater-waiters, played by Naomi Ackie and Alia Shawkat, get whisked away to the private island of tech mogul Slater King (Tatum). Once there, they come to suspect that below the beauty and glamour of the experience, something far darker is going on — and they may be powerless to fight it.

Small in scope but filled with big characters and ideas, the film is a bold directorial debut, with a compelling ensemble that also includes Christian Slater, Haley Joel Osment, Simon Rex, Adria Arjona, Geena Davis, and Kyle MacLachlan — actors who, Kravitz tells Consequence, “really understood the story and the tone. It’s very strange and specific, and so finding people who get it and get it easily was important to me. I wanted to curate a group of people who fit together. Magic can happen when you do that. And so, yeah, I think I just paid attention to everyone’s vibe.”

This was something that almost took on a meta energy, Kravitz says, thanks to the subject matter: “I wanted this to feel like a group of people who you believe are friends you want to hang out with, they all gel together. So that when the shift happens, it’s even more jarring.”

No one on set had an identical relationship to Kravitz, though speaking with members of the supporting cast, she did have a pre-existing personal connection with many of them. During a group interview with Christian Slater, Simon Rex, and Alia Shawkat, Slater croons that he “held her as a baaaaaby,” while Shawkat says they’ve been close friends “for a minute now. I don’t want to say how long, but for a while.”