He's charmed women on the dance floor both on (Step Up) and off screen. He's shown some skin and thrown a punch for director Dito Montiel in both his A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints and Fighting. He became a generation's favorite action figure and the big screen's ultimate soldier in last summer's box office hit G.I. Joe. And next week, as he steps into a military uniform for the third time, takes his shirt off on the beaches of South Carolina, and falls in love with an idealistic young woman named Savannah (Amanda Seyfried), actor Channing Tatum will also be able to add to his resume a starring role in Dear John, the latest of author Nicholas Sparks' challenge-laden romances to hit the big screen.

But despite that fact that Channing's status as a charming piece of man candy may have been able to fill an entire floor of Macy's with screaming teenage girls while he was in town promoting the film in San Francisco last week, when Channing sat down to talk about his role in Dear John with me and several other Bay Area Journalists, he quickly proved that his contributions to his films and the characters he plays draw on much more than just his body and his brawn.

Need your own proof? Just check out a bit of what he had to say on the complexities of war, the role of hardship in our lives, the value of fighting for the survival of relationships... and a few of the relationships that have impacted him.

On playing a soldier on film for the third time:

I think I started to do it because I've always had a fascination with the military and what it takes to be a soldier. My papa was a soldier, in the Korean War, but I never really got a chance to talk to him about it; he lost his ability to speak before I could ask him any questions about it. So, I never had anybody around me that really knew about it. I might have gone into the military, if I didn't get a football scholarship. I thought about it for a minute after I quit school, and I don't know, I just didn't. And I think I've always questioned whether I had what it takes to actually do it.

G.I. Joe, for some reason, I think it wasn't a real soldier for me. It was like X-Men. It's not like we were trying to depict what a real soldier is like and what they have to go through. Stop-Loss was, and we went through pretty intense training. But as much training as you can do and as many soldiers as they put you around, you're never going to know what it's like to be a soldier. You can just sort of try to have as much empathy and sympathy for them and just respect for them, and just try to wear the clothes right. 'Cause that's even hard to do. And, like, sling the gun right. It's an honor to get to play them, and I hope I do it halfway right.

On choosing to be in a film that deals with war amid an almost oversaturation of war films:

Doing a war film, I think in the beginning—Hollywood came out with all these different films. It's the reason why I wanted to play John: I think they haven't really wanted to paint soldiers in a good light or war in a good light. This movie, we tried to take a lot of the war and soldiering out of a uniform and not show him in a military atmosphere, 'cause this movie's not a war movie. To me, it's not. It's just about two kids falling in love for the first time and not having any idea how to do that, and how to get it right, because it's so hard to get that first one right, if not almost impossible.

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