Spoilers for Bullet Train ahead!
It’s become par for the course that if you are going to see a David Leitch movie, you should expect some sort of massive A-List celebrity cameo. With Brad Pitt showing up for .2 seconds in Deadpool 2 and Ryan Reynolds popping up in Hobbs & Shaw, audiences were left wondering who would make a minuscule appearance among the stellar ensemble cast of Bullet Train. In a serendipitous manner, it turns out that Channing Tatum was the big surprise waiting on the train, and he has finally addressed it.
Playing the aptly named Train Passenger, Channing Tatum enters the film when Brad Pitt’s character Ladybug asks him if he’d mind wearing his bucket hat to distract one of the assassins trying to kill him. This poor passenger was just trying to read a book, and, as Tatum wrote in his Instagram post, the ride got “a little weird.”
The cameo consists of Ladybug offering Channing Tatum’s character $200 to distract the assassins looking for him. Tatum is way less concerned with the danger of the situation and instead asks if this is all some “sex thing.” On Channing Tatum’s post of him reading his book, the @bulletttrainmovie referenced the nature of his cameo by commenting:
Train rides are great for catching up on reading…and other stuff 😏
The cameo added to the cheeky nature of the movie and Channing Tatum added even more humor into an already funny movie. The role was reminiscent of surprise appearance in Ryan Reynolds’ movie Free Guy where he plays the avatar of a stay-at-home adult child in the video game. This goes to show that Channing Tatum can bring the funny, even if he’s only in a movie for a couple of minutes.
At least for me, Channing Tatum’s cameo was one of my favorite bits of Bullet Train. He threw the audience, and the assassins, off rhythm. For those of us who saw The Lost City, his appearance also created a super fun connection between the two movies.
After David Leitch and Brad Pitt teamed up in Deadpool 2, they both got on board to create Bullet Train. An aspect of Deadpool that Pitt really loved was the cameos incorporated. Brad Pitt explained that he had a lot of fun with Channing Tatum’s cameo, especially since he had a cameo-adjacent role in Tatum’s movie The Lost City as a Fabio-ish man who attempts to help Tatum save Sandra Bullock.
The Lost City, which was released earlier this year and is now in the Paramount+ movie library, stars Bullock, who also shows up in Bullet Train as Brad Pitt’s handler. The cameos are everywhere!
Bullet Train topped the box office in its opening weekend and left audiences thinking about all the fun surprises that hopped on and off the crazy train cars. It also keeps the fun cycle of cameos in movies that star Brad Pitt, Channing Tatum, Sandra Bullock and/or Ryan Reynolds alive, and it will be exciting to see how they mix and match next.