MANILA, Philippines—In the film, Magic Mike’s Last Dance Mike Lane played by Channing Tatum, returns to the stage after a long hiatus, following a business transaction that fails, leaving him bankrupt and working as a bartender in Florida.
Mike travels to London with Maxandra Mendoza, a rich socialite (Salma Hayek Pinault) who entices him with an offer he can’t refuse and an agenda of her own. With everything on the line, can Mike—and the roster of gorgeous new dancers he’ll have to whip into shape be able to pull it off once he realizes what she genuinely has in mind?
Tatum explains, “Mike and Maxandra meet at a very interesting moment in their lives. Mike had taken his furniture company as far as it could go and it folded; Max had been in a marriage for a number of years and it’s fallen apart. They are both at this crossroads, thinking, ‘Who do I want to be now? What do I do now?’ That’s where we meet them, and where they meet each other.”
For Tatum, stepping back into Mike’s shoes meant putting himself through a rigorous training routine, as well as workshopping and creating his dance numbers from scratch with the choreography team.
Image courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
“At 42, it’s a whole different thing than when I was actually dancing at 19,” Tatum laughs. “It’s a full-time job, one-hundred percent. And the dancers, for me, were the reason to do the movie. They’re killers, each and every single one of them can do something that no one else on the planet can do as well; they’re one of a kind. And because of the Magic Mike Live shows around the world there are so many of them, so it was really hard to pick which dancers we wanted for the movie.”
One of the seminal performance scenes in the movie was inspired by, as Tatum describes it, “a very, very arresting dance that really takes your breath away.” The number involves a massive amount of water. “Working out a dance with water is very chancy, because you don’t know how slippery it will be at any moment, so we had to learn this over months of practice and really give our utter bodies and souls to it.”
Long before leaving for filming in London, Tatum got back into a routine of working out and rehearsing for hours each day, which continued throughout filming once he reached London.
Image courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
A Warner Bros. Pictures Presentation, “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” slides into theaters across the Philippines starting this February 8. Join the conversation online and use the hashtag #MagicMikesLastDance and watch the film’s trailer below.