Channing Tatum Is an Escaped Convict Living in a Toys ‘R’ Us in First ‘Roofman’ Trailer

Who lives in Toys “R” Us and robs Mickey D’s? Channing Tatum! Well at least in his new role.

“Roofman,” a new film coming this October from writer/director Derek Cianfrance and co-writer Kirt Gunn, just released its first trailer. The crime drama, based on real-world robber Jeffrey Manchester, almost looks too strange to be biographical.

Tatum stars as Manchester, an ex-Army Ranger who escapes prison after being arrested for robbing a string of McDonald’s locations. He earned his nickname by drilling holes in the ceilings of the buildings he planned to rob, jumping in from above. After Manchester escapes from prison, he sets up shop in the walls of a Toys “R” Us, living off of baby food as he plans his next crime. You can watch the trailer below.

Kirsten Dunst co-stars in the film as Leigh Wainscott, a divorced mother who enters into a romance with Manchester before learning about his criminal enterprise. Peter Dinklage portrays the manager of the overtaken Toys “R” Us, while Ben Mendelsohn, Juno Temple, LaKeith Stanfield and Uzo Aduba round out the cast.

While movies like “Cocaine Bear” take absurd headlines from the reality and heavily fictionalize them to flesh out a narrative, the real-life story of Jeffrey “Roofman” Manchester hardly needs massaging to make compelling.

Manchester acted as a real-life gentleman robber, with many of his victims from the early 2000s describing him as calm and cordial. A 2000 LA Times piece from his first arrest noted that Manchester would implore McDonald’s employees to don coats before locking them in the restaurants’ freezers. After robbing the registers, he would then inform the police to come and let the captives out.

Manchester used a variety of tools to carve holes into the roofs of the establishments he stole from, thus earning him his nickname. He would employ skills he learned in the military — notably, the solider learned how to rappel — to carry out his criminal acts.

The police eventually caught up with Manchester. The fast food thief was sentenced to more than four decades in prison — with the police only pinning two McDonald’s robberies on him. After four years, Manchester used a black-painted plywood platform he constructed while working in the prison’s metal shop to hide beneath a truck leaving the facility.

“Roofman” appears to pick up at this moment in Manchester’s life. Having escaped from prison, the thief set up shop in Charlotte, North Carolina, hiding away in a Toys “R” Us and neighboring Circuit City (if you can’t tell, the film is an early-2000s period piece).

It was during this period that Manchester started a relationship with the real Leigh Wainscott, who would later play a crucial role in his story. Manchester reportedly gave Wainscott’s children and a local church program toys he had pilfered from his hidden home. When asked what he did for work, Manchester portrayed himself as a secret government employee.

This stranger-than-fiction story marks Cianfrance’s first time in the director’s chair since 2020’s Emmy-nominated HBO miniseries “I Know This Much Is True.” That same year, Cianfrance earned a Best Original Screenplay nomination at the Academy Awards for his story credit on the Best Picture nominee “Sound of Metal.”

“Roofman” releases in theaters Oct. 10.

The post Channing Tatum Is an Escaped Convict Living in a Toys ‘R’ Us in First ‘Roofman’ Trailer appeared first on TheWrap.