Channing Tatum was the only choice for the mysterious Slater King, says director Zoë Kravitz for “Blink Twice”

Channing Tatum as Slater King in #BlinkTwiceMovie

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To play tech billionaire Slater King in her feature film directorial debut “Blink Twice,” Zoë Kravitz immediately wanted Channing Tatum. At the time she didn’t know him, but she wanted to see him do something unlike anything he had ever done before and thought he would be a perfect match for Slater. His naturally good-natured demeanor would lure the audience – and Frida (played by Naomi Ackie) – onto the film’s mysterious island.

In the psychological thriller “Blink Twice,” when tech billionaire Slater King (Tatum) meets cocktail waitress Frida (Ackie) at his fundraising gala, sparks immediately fly. He then invites her to join him and his friends on a dream vacation on his private island. But as strange things start to happen, Frida begins to question her reality. She’ll have to uncover the truth if she wants to make it out of this party alive.

Watch the trailer: https://youtu.be/aCuT-klGby4

When the script got into Tatum’s hands, he found it both “exciting” and “terrifying.” Slater offered up a new challenge for him in that he would have to inhabit a person who was nothing like him. “Almost every dude I’ve ever played I’ve had some sort of connection to them,” he says. “There’s nothing really to love about Slater. There just isn’t, he’s a full psychopath.”

But Tatum was also intrigued by the possibility of doing something daring, and in Kravitz he found an eager collaborator in challenging himself. “We’ve talked about lots of different versions of Slater,” he says. “The one thing that we both agreed upon is that we didn’t want to do the, the very stereotypical movie moment in a thriller where you reveal the bad guy.”

Finding her Frida was a “whole other journey” for Kravitz. “It’s a hard part,” Kravitz says. “She’s many things at once. You kind of never really get a real handle on who she is. How manipulative is she? How unaware? Is she the villain? Is she the victim? There’s so many different elements to that character.” Casting director Carmen Cuba offered up an option: Naomi Ackie, star of films like “Lady Macbeth” and “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” Kravitz was not as familiar with Ackie’s work, but once she watched her projects like “Master of None” and “The End of the F***ing World” she was blown away. “I was like, ‘What a beast!’” Kravitz says. “And also her face is like so cinematic.”

Ackie remembers that what was supposed to be an initial chat with Kravitz turned into a two-hour conversation around the ideas of the film. “There was a lot that conversation brought up for me around the idea of the pursuit of power, about sexual assault, but also about Frida’s want for something more,” Ackie says. “Her relationship with the symbol of power that is Slater, how that affects her and that gives her blind spots to certain things. There’s many different things going on at the same time about how people are interacting with each other when it comes to these ideas of status and money, and they’re all abusing it in one way or another. We talked about Frida as quite an interesting, imperfect character, and how that made her a really interesting victim.”

In Tatum, Ackie found a supportive partner to play off. “I think there was an awareness for both of us that we were tapping into some really hard sh*t,” Ackie says. “His character as this awful guy who does really f***ing awful things, and my character as someone who is suffering from those awful things. Those aren’t easy, so we had to balance it with silliness and goofiness and making sure that everyone felt safe.”

Of Ackie, Tatum says she’s “probably one of the more talented people I’ve worked with.” He adds: “You walk into a scene and you’re like, man, this is kind of a hard scene. And she’ll just walk right through it. Like, not a problem at all.”

Don’t miss “Blink Twice” opening only in cinemas August 21. #BlinkTwiceMovie

Photos and video from Warner Bros. Pictures