LOS ANGELES—Move over, Michael Fassbender and Jessica Chastain. Your unofficial shared title as 2011’s busiest people in showbiz appears already to have been assigned, for 2012, to an unlikely star, former stripper Channing Tatum.

Fassbender and Chastain had four and five feature films, respectively, released in Vancouver theatres in 2011, but Tatum should manage five by July. Interestingly, the list of films includes something that resembles a biopic, the June release of Magic Mike, the story of a teenaged male stripper that is loosely based on Tatum’s own story.

In a Los Angeles hotel room, where he has come to promote the second of the five films, The Vow, Tatum says that he shot the films at different times but their distributors all chose the first half of 2012 to move them into theatres. However, he says that the films have such different audiences it’s unlikely that he will be overexposed.

“I had no intention of having five coming out, but between directors and studios disagreeing on dates for them, they kind of got held over till now. But they are all so different. It’s a high-class problem as far as overexposure goes. I definitely look at it, but I am not overly concerned about it. I didn’t get to go to acting class or school, and so everything is on-the-job training for me. I am in acting school every day that I walk on-set. But when I look at my favourite filmmakers, they just keep making movies. Look at [Magic Mike director] Steven Soderbergh. He has made over 50 films [as a producer or director]. It is insane. The Coen brothers keep making movies. They don’t say, ‘Maybe I should just chill out for a while. Maybe I should not make this movie, because I just made a movie like it.’ They just make movies they are interested in. I think that is the best way to go about doing the things you do.”

(The other three films are Haywire, which was released in late January; 21 Jump Street, which comes out in March; and G. I. Joe: Retaliation, to be released in late June.)

In The Vow, he plays a Chicago music-studio owner named Leo who falls in love with and marries a woman (Rachel McAdams) from wealth who left it all behind to become an artist. After a serious car accident, she no longer remembers that she started a new life. Her memories end before she left her family and got married. Meanwhile, her inability to remember him or their life together has left Leo frustrated but determined to win her back. (The film opens Friday [February 10]. )

Tatum says that it was the idea that one member of a relationship can remember everything about their life together and the other cannot that made him want to make the movie.

“I can’t imagine what that would be like. I am married, and the movie touches on that you are the sum of all your memories, and here they just get erased on one side. Everything is the same for Leo, but she has no memory of him, so he is left with all the scars of having to carry that. Even though she was the one who went through the horrible part, she is better off because she can reset and start over. It is an extraordinary circumstance with a very real and frustrating journey that he has to go through. But if I had been the person who had gone into a coma and awakened to see her [McAdams] and was told that she was my wife, it would have been a very short movie. I would have said, ‘Awesome. Screw the other guy.’ ”

Tatum moved from modelling to acting in 2005 with a part on CSI: Miami and a role in the film Coach Carter. Before the modelling, he was a stripper in his hometown of Tampa, Florida. He says that going back to the streets of Tampa to play an older stripper who takes a rookie (Alex Pettyfer) under his wing was a lot of fun.

“To walk the same streets in Tampa was really cool. It was wild. I was broke then, and now I am back doing a movie about the whole thing, strapping on the thong again. That was very interesting but very humbling as well. It’s not as easy as when you are 19 and don’t think about it. You are just thinking, ‘Wow, this is fun,’ and now it’s more like, ‘What am I doing? This is stupid.’ But it was really wild.”

As for whether his younger self would have respect for the man he has become, Tatum says it’s highly unlikely.

“My teenage self would be making fun of me right now. He would be throwing things at me if I was walking by.”

Watch the trailer for The Vow.