Twenty-four-year-old model/actress Cody Horn plays Channing Tatum's love interest in Magic Mike, and she is terrible enough to do major damage on the film's pacing and energy. She is one big suck every time she's onscreen, and she's onscreen a lot. It seems ridiculous that someone so inept would have landed such a high-profile role and get to kiss on something as plump and hitmaking as Channing Tatum's pair of lips and get paid for it.

It seems that way, at least, until you realize that her father, Alan Horn, was the president and COO of Warner Bros., when Magic Mike was being cast. (He's now at Disney.) Do I even need to tell you that Magic Mike is a Warner Bros. picture?

It appears that to ask Horn directly if her father helped secure the role is either off limits or too rude for the sensibilities of the journalists who've interviewed her recently. She does have a story about her audition (which wasn't an audition, but an "interview") that sounds about as mythical as Tori Spelling's weird yarn about changing her name to try out for her dad Aaron Spelling's show Beverly Hills, 90210. Horn recently told the Huffington Post:

It is a pretty crazy story. They weren't going to see me because they thought I was too young, but my agent, Jason, fought for me to go in. Carmen Cuba, the casting director, agreed to meet with me, and we taped the interview. She asked me questions about my life, my dating history, things like that. We talked like girlfriends would; it was more friendly than a formal interview. I then got a call that I was to go in and audition for them, which I did. After we finished the scenes, Carmen excused the guy I was reading with and said, "this will never happen to you again for the rest of your career, but you booked the role before you came in." I'm not sure what Steven and the producers saw in me, but I'm glad they saw something they liked!

Magical realism or magical nepotism? We'll never know for sure. (Except we totally do.)

Update: It needs to be noted that Warner Bros. did not acquire the independently financed Magic Mike until late October — almost two months after it started filming and several more after it had been cast. So this is not a strict case of a woman taking the fast lane into her daddy's production. How much Horn's familial connections helped her land the role is still debatable, but the situation is more complicated than this post initially implied.

[Image via Getty]