If you missed the Mountain Dew commercial, you may remember Channing Tatum as one of Tear Sheet Magazine's 50 Most Beautiful faces (October 2001), or even as the kid with the platinum Mohawk in Ricky Martin's video "She Bangs." But regardless, in less than two years he's been featured in campaigns for Nautica, Abercrombie & Fitch, Emporio Armani, Gap, Aeropostale and American Eagle, in addition to television commercials for Pepsi, Mountain Dew and American Eagle, and the sequel to his first 'Dew' spot hits this summer. First movie? He's already signed.

Channing has been photographed by Wes Bell, Todd Oldham, Tom Munro, Tony Duran, Richard Phibbs, Mikael Jannsen, Bruce Weber, Arnaldo Anaya Lucca, Dewey Nicks, Walter Chin, Rudy Martinez, Pamela Hanson and Randall Mesdon, for Vogue, Flaunt, Gentlemen's Options, Spoon, Empire Magazine, Out, Contents, l'Uomo Vogue and Citizen K magazines. He's achieved belted status in Kung Fu and Gor-Chor Kung Fu, and has years of experience practicing the ancient art of Wah-lum and Capoeira, the Brazilian dance/martial artform.

Born on April 26 and just turned twenty-two years of age, he stands 6' 1-1/2" tall, and is a true Tauran — "kind of animalistic," as he later confides. Part native American, part Irish and part French, he has all the pride, charm and passion that ancestry implies. What's clear is that he's going places, fast. But it all began where he was born, in a tiny little town just outside of Montgomery, Alabama, called Culman.

"I left Alabama when I was very young," Channing says as he sits down to chat. "But all my mom's family is there and we still have land, so I go back just about every summer. It's been a little bit more difficult the past two years just because I've been so busy."

Do you still have childhood memories?

From where my grandmother Nana and my Papa used to live. I loved my Nana and my Papa. They were my roots. Every summer my folks sent me off to the country to stay with them, hoping to keep me out of trouble. And you know grandparents are so real they don't even know how to be fake. They never bother saying what you want to hear, they just say "this is the way it is." I'd get up to something and they would just look at me and shake their heads and say: "Oh Channing ..."

You said you left Alabama at an early age?

When I was six we moved to Mississippi. We lived on the bayou actually, right on the Mississippi River, and that's where a lot of my early memories come from.

What was it like?

All the rattlesnakes and alligators a boy could possibly chase, fishing every day, Pop Warner football league, stuff like that. It was one of those kinds of settings. I'm not a country bumpkin hillbilly, but I do love the outdoors, totally.