In 2011, Luke Broadlick, a dancer on Britney Spears’ Femme Fatale tour, was feeling “ambitious and cheeky,” goofing around with his fellow performers who were hanging out on a couch. He eventually ended up on the lap of supervising choreographer Alison Faulk. “I was giving her a little bit of a fun lap dance,” he says. “She looks up at me and she goes, ‘I think I have a job for you.'”
That job was working on Magic Mike, a new Steven Soderbergh film about male exotic dancers, as an assistant choreographer.
Fast forward 12 years, and there have been two Magic Mike sequels—the latest, and allegedly final, Magic Mike’s Last Dance released last weekend—multiple currently running Magic Mike Live stage shows, and an HBO Max reality series, Finding Magic Mike. Broadlick and Faulk have worked on all of them, up to co-choreographing Last Dance.
In the process, they’ve had a lot of laughs and learned a lot about lap dances. “We just love the project so much,” Faulk says. “We’re always laughing and having a good time. If you’re not laughing and having fun when you’re making up lap dances, then your life sucks. You’ve literally lost.” (They’ve both had cameos on screen—in Magic Mike XXL, for instance, Faulk is “White Shadow” the girl running around in a bikini and motorcycle helmet at the beginning of the movie punching star Channing Tatum in the stomach.)
Their work on Magic Mike has also evolved from recreating the rhythms of a Tampa strip club to orchestrating an extravaganza of male athleticism complete with a rain soaked number where Tatum swings a ballerina around. Between the first two movies, the men turned from “male strippers” to “entertainers,” Broadlick says, as they incorporated story into their routines. (In the grand finale of XXL, Mike’s crew is encouraged to explore their passions onstage, inspiring Matt Bomer’s character to perform a full serenade while Joe Mangianello’s indulges a wedding fantasy that leads into sex swing antics.) In Last Dance, he adds, it’s another elevation of that concept. “It’s not just the sexiness,” Broadlick says. “It’s an experience that is actually entertaining.”
Last Dance boasts the most challenging sequence in the entire franchise: a waterlogged number where Tatum and a female partner are entangled in a muscular and steamy pas de deux as fake rain falls from the ceiling of the venue. It’s a version of a routine that Faulk and Broadlick initially choreographed for the stage shows. To perfect it for the film, they practiced in Faulk’s garage, laying down tarp and throwing buckets of water on it. “We’re just sliding around like maniacs in my garage,” she remembers. If that sounds genuinely dangerous, that’s because it is. The male partner needs to maintain his balance so the woman can execute the slippery moves. At one point during filming, Tatum’s partner Kylie Shea accidentally hit Tatum in the nose with her pelvis, causing him to bleed. (Faulk only has praise for Tatum: “He makes that shit look so easy.”)
Esther Zuckerman
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