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.”)
Faulk and Tatum first connected back in 2006 through his ex-wife Jenna Dewan, who became roommates with Faulk after they met dancing for Janet Jackson. “He was like our third roommate for a little while,” she says. So when he was prepping Magic Mike, he reached out to Faulk asking her to help out.
The first movie was a learning curve. Falk and Broadlick went to strip shows and gathered research in order to produce the “authentic” material Soderbergh wanted. It was also their first time working with actors who weren’t necessarily dancers. Not Tatum, of course, who, yes, stripped himself before Hollywood beckoned. “Chan is like extremely collaborative,” Faulk says. “He is like another choreographer on all these projects.” For what it’s worth, Broadlick, who has martial arts training, did work with Tatum on his flips.
Tatum is also the “G.O.A.T.” when it comes to lap dancing, according to Faulk, even better than the professional dancers they have recruited. Faulk has now had a lot of experience with lap dances. “I’m always the guinea pig,” she says. “I’m always the girl in the chair.” Their rules for a good lap dance: Establish a genuine connection with the person receiving the grinding and be confident but not cocky. “Once the guy goes into a moment where he has this cockiness to him, it immediately runs flat,” Broadlick says. (During the live shows there’s a safe word involved so everyone’s comfort level is respected.)
Last Dance opens with a particularly athletic version of this technique that Tatum’s Mike Lane gives to Maxandra, the wealthy love interest played by Salma Hayek Pinault. The duet involves familiar pelvic thrusts, but also various other feats including a pull up and a lift where Tatum carries Pinault on his shoulders.
There were even more wild ideas that didn’t make the final cut. “I don’t know how I got there, but my head was by a wall and I was laying on the ground and then Chan did a back roll and ended up in a handstand over me and started sliding down the wall with his face toward my face and ended up on top of me,” Faulk says. “That was so fly.” (If you have trouble envisioning the mechanics of that, don’t worry, you’re not alone.)
Because of the success of not just the films, but also the live shows, Magic Mike has transformed into something that’s far more than just another gig for Faulk and Broadlick. “I feel like we’ve been gifted this really beautiful opportunity to be a part of a cultural moment where we get to create some fun stuff that hopefully sparks a lot of joy and is a beacon of light for people,” she says.
Sure enough it’s hard not to smile when you’re watching impossibly buff men thrust their hips and lift women into gravity defying positions. As Faulk says, “The vibes are always great.” And they are.