Working alongside Channing Tatum in the new movie Fly Me to the Moon was an easy task for Scarlett Johansson.
“He’s not hard to fall in love with, I would say,” the actress, 39, shared during an appearance on the Monday, July 8, episode of Today. “He’s just very charismatic. … He’s just [an] absolutely loveable guy.”
Adding that Tatum, 44, is both an “easygoing” and “professional person,” Johansson told host Savannah Guthrie that the two found it easy to form a bond on set. “It was nice to just be like, ‘OK, so what’s your story? Where are we connecting,’” she explained. “And I think it was just easy chemistry, and again, he’s easy on the eyes.”
Fly Me to the Moon stars Tatum as a NASA official working on the Apollo 11 moon landing. Johansson plays a marketing executive who butts heads with Tatum’s character after being brought on the project to film a fake version of the moon landing as a backup in case things go wrong.
“We have this kind of meet cute and then don’t realize that we’re actually, kind of, working as polar opposites,” Johansson teased. “And so, there’s a lot of friction there. And he is very by the books, he has a ton of integrity. He is kind of a control freak, and I am just not something that he can control.”
Fly Me to the Moon marks Johansson and Tatum’s third movie together, though it’s the first time they’ve actually shared a scene together. “He and [Anne] Hathaway did a little part in Don Jon where they recreated a romantic comedy,” Johansson stated. “And again, we worked — I wouldn’t say together — we were both [a part of] Hail, Caesar!, and so, this was the first time that we actually got to have dialogue.”
Scarlett Johansson as Kelly Jones and Channing Tatum as Cole Davis in ‘Fly Me to the Moon.’ Dan McFadden
Directed by Greg Berlanti, Fly Me to the Moon also stars Woody Harrelson, Ray Romano and Jim Rash. On Today, Johansson revealed that the idea for the film was inspired by real-life speculation surrounding the moon landing.
“I have a production company here in New York called These Pictures and one of our associates, our head of film, Kenan, just was toying around with this idea of, like, ‘Well, what if this conspiracy theory [that the moon landing was faked] was true?’ Could you build a genre movie around it?’” she told Guthrie, 52.
Ahead of the film’s release, Tatum gave fans a behind-the-scenes look at the project by sharing vintage-style set photos via Instagram.
Scarlett Johansson as Kelly Jones and Channing Tatum as Cole Davis in ‘Fly Me to the Moon.’ Dan McFadden
“I love taking pictures. And when you are on set of a movie in 1968 they make for great f—king images,” he captioned a June 26 photos slideshow featuring a selfie with Johansson and Berlanti, 52.
In another Instagram post, which he captioned “1968,” Tatum shared a photo of Johansson making a funny face at the camera while sporting white sunglasses and a red lip.
Fly Me to the Moon lands in theaters on Friday, July 12.
