Actress Thandie Newton Fired From Magic Mike 3 After Getting In "Unimaginably Vicious" Fight With Channing Tatum About...Politics? Voting Rights? Immigration? No...The Will Smith Slap

Astrid Stawiarz. Getty Images.

NY Post — Thandie Newton was reportedly fired from the new Magic Mike movie after getting into a heated argument on set with Channing Tatum about Will Smith’s infamous Oscar smackdown of Chris Rock.

The feud... escalated to such “astonishing” and “unimaginably vicious” levels that Tatum stormed off the West London set of “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” and drove off in a car.

The crew had been filming for 11 days before the dramatic turn of events, the report said.

Producers of the sequel ultimately decided to re-cast Newton’s lead female role, which will now be played by Salma Hayek, according to Variety.

It was unclear from The Sun’s report exactly when the epic dust-up occurred, or what positions Newton and Tatum took in their heated debate.

I, like everyone else in the world, was shocked, stunned, stupefied watching Will Smith saunter up onto the Oscars stage and proceed to absolutely bitchslap the taste out of Chris Rock's mouth. I spent those next few hours afterwards lurking around Twitter observing all the instant reactions and hot takes, enjoying the clips and memes, nodding along with the arguments I agreed with when Team Chris and Team Will camps formed and slugged it out. I even went back in the morning to see what I missed overnight, was curious to see what consequences came out of it, but ultimately, like every other buzzworthy thing that happens, was more or less over it by the afternoon. I knew the news cycle would continue to beat it to death for a while longer and that plenty of people would still have takes to unload on social media strangers. But…even knowing extremely well how the internet works…I was STILL suprised by the sheer magnitude of 5,000 word thinkpieces, the deep soul-searching, the essays that saw no less than the entire fate of the free world hanging in the wake of The Slap. Internet-Intellectuals and wannabe philosophers trying to map complex social phenomena on what was essentially the most simple, understandable example of human behavior ever: one dude hitting another dude for insulting his wife. To quote all the little kids on Tik Tok, sometimes, it's really not that deep. 

So imagine my surprise hearing more than 2 weeks later that two Hollywood professionals, two grown adults in their 40s, felt passionately enough about it to not only fight about it in the middle of the set during filming of their blockbuster movie, but to have an "astonishing, unimaginably vicious" fight about it, to the point one stormed off and drove away, and the other was literally fired from the movie. Over a slap! 

“After the row he just went, ‘I am not working with her anymore.’ Him being a producer, it’s his movie, so she’s off the movie,” the source told The Sun.

Director Steven Soderbergh tried to diffuse the situation, but to no avail, the source reportedly said.

“He was trying to calm things down but he’s a very quiet man.”

I mean Thandie Newton is far from a no-namer struggling for work in Hollywood; she's not going hungry tonight without a paycheck from one movie.  That said, this isn't exactly an insignificant indie movie she stormed off the set and got axed from. Magic Mike was a $167 million movie. Magic Mike XXL was $122.5 million.  The fact that they cost a shade over $20 million to make — not each, both combined — makes those numbers even bigger, as does the fact they were 79% and 65% fresh respectively on Rotten Tomatoes; actually respected movies critically, and obviously hugely popular with audiences. Any actor in Hollywood from the A to the D List is going to have a tough time spinning a firing from a movie like that — and a firing for pissing off the lead and face of the franchise so badly he literally speeds off the set?  And maybe worse: getting tagged with the dreaded "diva" tag?

“Channing Tatum is the producer and number one on set. Thandie Newton is the number two star. But 11 days into shooting and it’s all over,” a crew member told the British tabloid.

“They fell out over the debacle at The Oscars. I was on set. I watched her and watched him. They were in and out of the house where we were filming having this confrontation.

“It was a tense exchange of words, but suddenly it escalated. Channing got into this car and he disappeared,” the source reportedly said, adding that Newton behaved like a “diva” on the set before the argument.

Oof. That's a lot to potentially lose over…I'll be honest, I'm still not entirely clear what two positions exist that conflict SO strongly they could lead to an unimaginable vicious fight. 

Of course Newton may have already been flirting with the diva label, after going viral a couple years ago for her comments about her time on Mission Impossible 2. The headlines: "Tom Cruise is a NIGHTMARE to work with." But the actual story amounted to what was basically a public shaming of Tom for having a pimple on his nose, and for getting "frustrated" when she kept messing up her scenes. 

Seriously, that was the allegation. I'm not underplaying it. The story ran everywhere saying Cruise was a nightmare because he gave her a Scientology book as a gift and because he wasn't thrilled about her messing up scenes in his billion-dollar film franchise and suggested trying out a new approach. "The actress…described a particularly difficult scene with Cruise, in which the actor got increasingly frustrated with Newton’s performance…His solution? To rehearse the scene in switched roles… 'So we filmed the entire scene with me being him…and him playing me,” she said. “And it was the most unhelpful . . . I can’t think of anything less revealing. It just pushed me further into a place of terror and insecurity.'" That was it, just that. And one day she watched a whitehead form on his nose. 

“I remember at the beginning of the night, seeing this slight red mark on his nose, and by the end of the night, I kid you not — this is how his metabolism is so fierce — he had a big whitehead where that red dot was,” she said. “And it was like the zit was me, just getting bigger and bigger.”

So I guess in context, if pushing you to do your job well and some minor adult acne is a "nightmare," someone expressing a different opinion than you about a slap is a horror just too overwhelming to endure.  

But all's well that ends well — in the end, everyone gets what they want: Newton gets to escape the living trauma of male strippers with Slap opinions, all the "horny" women get their oiled-up shirtless hunks one more time, and the boyfriends and husbands they drag along with them get Salma Hayek.