STACK #132 Oct 2016

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with CHANNINGTATUM & REID CAROLIN .

DashaunWesleyWilliams, Matt Bomer, Kevin Nash, Joe Manganiello, ChanningTatum & Adam Rodriguez

What was the energy when everybody got back together and were training and learning all the choreography together? RC: It was like a reunion. I don’t think anybody knew what it really was on the first one, but on this one, everybody was like, ‘I’m bringing it this time. Let’s go.’ Adam Rodriguez learned how to break dance. It was just a wholly different experience. Everybody worked out even harder than they did on the first one, and took it all a little more seriously, knowing that people were actually going to see this movie. [Laughs]

CT: Exactly. Magic Mike was like a feathered fish—a lowbrow subject with a highbrow director. RC: We showed Magic Mike XXL to the actors for the first time recently, and for me, instead of watching the movie and thinking, ‘Well, we should change this and change that,’ I was watching it like it was like a high school yearbook on video or something. I was just enjoying all the memories. That was a great thing. In retrospect, I think it was the reason to make the movie. When we actually set out to do it, both things lined up, which was nice.

We got to get this group of people together and have fun. And I don’t even know where other stories could possibly go. The cool thing was that, to us, the story was really a way to bring these creative people together and showcase their strengths to the world and all that fun stuff. Can you talk about the tone you wanted to bring to this film, and where you wanted the story to go? CT: The first film had a darker thread, a tinge of seeing into the underbelly of a weird little subculture. On some level, it’s entertaining to get a window into that—there’s a lot of fun, a bit of danger, and, obviously, some very, very adrift people. I don’t want to say lost because they all have very specific things that they want. They’re all hustlers. They’ve all got things they’re doing on the side. But this has pretty much been the only constant in their life. I think, Steven [Soderbergh] especially had a point of view on that. It was kind of skewed that they were the outliers and might not be the people you’d want to be bringing home to mom. There’s an edge to them. I think this movie just gets into them as people so that you understand who they are. And, yeah, they’re all a little

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