The Secret to Making ‘Magic Mike XXL”s Channing Tatum Strip
By her own admission, Alison Faulk has never had a problem “dancing like a dude.” When she took on the assignment of staging the routines in Magic Mike XXL, however, the 38-year-old choreographer had to dial her inner oversexed guy up to 11. “We wanted those scenes to feel daring and dirty,” she says. “We wanted it to be really sexy — the sort of stuff where you you watch the actors do the moves and then ask yourself, ‘Um, have we just crossed a line? Is this too much?'”
Judging from the ecstatic faces of the women in the abs-fabulous sequences featuring Channing Tatum, Joe Manganiello and various others’ gymnastically gyrating groins, we’re apt to say they were juuuust right — as well as “Mission Accomplished.” Like the original Magic Mike, this sequel to the 2012 male-stripper melodrama is full of Faulk’s athletic set pieces featuring exotic “entertainers” plying their trade. But this time out, the dance sequences are not just hot and heavy but even more heavily influenced by Faulk’s theatrical work choreographing for artists like Pink and Madonna, as well as the chops she’s honed hoofing in movies like Step Up and the all-female breaking crew called the Beat Freaks. Thanks to her, XXL may be the first great strip-hop movie of our time.
Faulk walked us through five of the film’s best bump-and-grind sequences, with an eye towards collaborating with the performers. “I can’t tell you how much I love these actors,” she says. “Their dedication and commitment to these dances was just unreal.”