Magic Mike: The Last Dance was almost Salma Hayek Pinault’s last dance, apparently. While making an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, she shared that Channing Tatum “nearly killed” her while filming an ambitious lap dance for the third and final film in the series.
Jimmy Kimmel aired a clip from Magic Mike: The Last Dance, which hits theaters on February 10, in which Hayek Pinault’s Maxandra Mendoza receives a five-minute lap dance from Tatum’s titular Mike, or, as Kimmel cheekily put it, Mike “Channings all over your Tatum.” Hayek Pinault described the choreography for the film as “technical and challenging” and claimed that the dangerous lap dance did not make it into the final cut of the movie. “This one part that’s not in it where I’m upside down, and my legs had to be somewhere,” she said. “But, upside down, one loses sense of direction, and I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, so in the rehearsal, I went, like, head down—almost hit my head.”
Matters were made more worse because Hayek Pinault couldn’t remember whether or not she was wearing underwear during the scene. “[Tatum] held on to my pants, but I was really concerned because my pants were going away, and I couldn’t remember if I had underwear or not in this moment,” she said. “So, instead of putting my hands to protect my head, I just held on to the pants. He’s like, ‘Put your hands up,’ and I’m like, ‘No, no, no, no.’”
Ultimately, Hayek Pinaut survived the incident, which Tatum hadn’t even realized was as dangerous as it was. “Everybody came in and kind of took me away from [Tatum], and he said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I said, ‘What’s wrong with me? You nearly killed me!’”
Salma Hayek Pinault said that before starring in Magic Mike: The Last Dance she had never received a male lap dance before. “If you’re going to start somewhere, why not Channing?” She noted that after spending a career playing exotic dancers in films like From Dusk Till Dawn and Dogma, it was nice to have the tables turned. “You know what, I deserve it,” she said. “I had to play the stripper in so many movies before, and now I get to sit down and enjoy.”
