STACK #132 Oct 2016

1

2

3 4

with CHANNINGTATUM & REID CAROLIN .

The first Magic Mike was a global success, and I’m wondering how that informed your approach to Magic Mike XXL ? REID CAROLIN: We never planned on Magic Mike succeeding in the way it did. CHANNINGTATUM: We made it in such a way that we assured ourselves that it could at least break even. [Laughs] RC: It was a movie about rejecting the world of stripping and leaving behind some of the narcissistic qualities that make you want to stay away from that world. At the same time, people really embraced the characters and the dancing and all of these other things, and everyone started asking, ‘What are you going to do with the second one?’ Honestly, there were a million ways that you could make a sequel to a dance movie just to make money. But I think, for us, it was always about if we’re going to do this, let’s do our best not to let that be our intention because if it was, it would just fall apart at the seams. Luckily, it’s based on a storyline that was really part of the reason we wanted to make the first movie, but which we just

couldn’t find a place for at the time. So we thought to ourselves, ‘Well, we still wFoant to make that movie.’ Regardless if the first one succeeded or not, we would probably be thinking about trying to make that movie at some point in our careers anyway.

to keep the audience at our fake strip club engaged between takes. And we watched Joe Manganiello and Kevin Nash cracking jokes backstage, and Adam Rodriguez doing his thing. We looked at all of them and thought, ‘Well, that’s a movie. So how do we make it?’ CT: Just being themselves and not playing into these old stereotypes of what strippers do on stage or these archetypes of firemen and men in police uniforms, they’re the best versions of any stripper that has ever lived. After the opening weekend of the first movie, we were thinking, ‘Man, I think we might get a chance to make another one if we want to, and we definitely know Matt’s singing. What else do we have?’ That was pretty much where we started—I’ve got to be honest. There was no over-arching dramatic storyline or anything. I regretted not having more room for the guys in the first film. They were complete discoveries. I had never worked with any of them, except once with Adam. And they just came in and wowed us. They completely became these people that we weren’t expecting, and they were all so interesting.

We looked at all of them and thought, ‘Well, that’s a movie. So how do we make it?’

CT: Because it’s so weird. RC: Because it’s so freaking weird, exactly. Then you’ve got this group of guys we cast, whose characters were just barely explored because they weren’t the focus of the movie: Matt Bomer, Adam Rodriguez, Joe Manganiello, Kevin Nash. On the first movie, Matt Bomer would be singing

stack.net.au