In a wide-ranging new interview, the Channing Tatum detailed his decision to step away from acting for a few years. Tatum, 41, explained that he felt burned out after starring in four films "back to back," particularly after he shot the last two: "22 Jump Street and "Jupiter Ascending."

"I felt like I was the fat kid at the buffet, just working and working and working," Tatum recalled. "I took four movies back to back without any time off."

"I wasn't as good as I wanted to be in those last two movies because I didn't have the energy," he added.

While "22 Jump Street" performed well at the box office and was well-received by critics, "Jupiter Ascending" bombed and received terrible reviews.

"'Jupiter Ascending' was a nightmare from the jump," Tatum said of the film. "It was a sideways movie. All of us were there for seven months, busting our hump. It was just tough."

Tatum also talked about the road to co-directing his first movie, "Dog," with his longtime partner Reid Carolin.
Before he came up with the idea for the MGM indie, Tatum and Carolin spent four years developing "Gambit," a raunchy movie based on the "X-Men" mutant.

Tatum was absolutely devastated when the movie fell apart.

"Once 'Gambit' went away, I was so traumatized," Tatum says, adding that he swore off watching the Avengers. "I shut off my Marvel machine. I haven't been able to see any of the movies. I loved that character. It was just too sad. It was like losing a friend because I was so ready to play him."

The superhero project was set up at Twentieth Century Fox in 2016, and Tatum and Carolin had lobbied to share the director's title.

"The studio really didn't want us to direct it," Tatum says. "They wanted anybody but us, essentially, because we had never directed anything."

The "Logan Lucky" star admitted that he considered walking away from Hollywood altogether in 2018. In April of that year, Tatum and Jenna Dewan announced they were separating after nearly nine years of marriage. The former couple share daughter Everly, 8.