Channing Tatum Blew His Audition For THE FAST & THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT

I love the Fast & Furious movies, but while I recognize that Justin Lin's The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift was an important piece of the puzzle and basically saved the series. There are people who will go to bat for that movie as being legitimately great, and I can't wrap my brain around that line of thinking; for me, it's one of the worst movies in the series by far. Lucas Black's awful accent is unbearable...but here's a what-if scenario that might have made the movie far more bearable: Channing Tatum auditioned to star in it.

Now, remember: this was pre-21 Jump Street Tatum, when basically all he'd done was Coach Carter. Toyko Drift came out in 2006, so the auditions probably happened a year before that; he hadn't even done Step Up by that point! So this would have been a very important movie in his career...not to mention the fact that he'd likely be involved in the ongoing franchise in a big way right now, reprising his role in future films. Listen to him talk about how he blew the audition on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and yearn for a version of Tokyo Drift that never was: