A top Hollywood pair combines for an inspiring love story, writes Peter Mitchell

Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum play a married couple in the new romantic drama, The Vow, and on a recent day in Beverly Hills, months after they wrapped filming, they appear to be husband and wife.

“Is my nose wiggling?” McAdams, the 33-year-old Canadian beauty, asks Tatum with a concerned look on her face.

Tatum, the 31-year-old actor from Alabama who has become one of Hollywood’s favourite leading men, is amused by the out-of-the-blue question.

“No,” he tells McAdams.

The actress, after months on set with practical joker Tatum, thinks he is taking the mickey out of her midway through the interview.

“You just wiggled your nose,” she tells him.

“Did I?” a bewildered Tatum asks.

“Yes,” McAdams laughs.

When it is brought up to McAdams, who has been in a relationship with British actor Michael Sheen since 2010, and Tatum, married to actress Jenna Dewan for two years, that they are indeed acting like a couple, they laugh.

“Nah, we’re good friends,” Tatum says.

It is no wonder they are close as The Vow was an emotional ride for both actors.

The movie follows young married bohemian couple Paige (McAdams), a sculptor, and Leo (Tatum), owner of a small recording studio, as their lives are turned upside down when a truck rear ends their vehicle at a stop sign. The force of the impact catapults Paige through the windscreen and when she emerges from a coma she does not recognise Leo.

The head trauma has erased the memory of the most recent four years of her life, so she has no idea who he is.

Paige does have fond memories of her wealthy mother (played by Jessica Lange) and father (Sam Neill), sister (Jessica McNamee) and her former fiance (Scott Speedman), but she does not remember a disturbing event that resulted in her shunning her family, quitting law school and moving to downtown Chicago to attend art school.

Paige, with no memory of Leo, gravitates back to her former life and fiance, but Leo can’t let her go.

It sounds like a story made up in a Hollywood screenwriter’s head, but The Vow is inspired by a real life couple, Kim and Krickitt Carpenter, who were in a car accident in New Mexico and wrote a book about their journey in falling in love with each other again. “It is torture for my character because he remembers everything,” Tatum says.

“If I leave the frame, she just gets to go back to her fiance. That’s traumatic for him. He has all of these memories and chains he has to carry for the rest of his life. They are beautiful and he doesn’t want to let them go, but it is a weird predicament. She is hurt physically, but he is left with the emotional scars.”

>> The Vow (PG) opens at cinemas nationwide today. 

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