As the release date for Magic Mike’s Last Dance inches near, it’s important to remember this: Salma Hayek is historically very good at dancing! Her dance sequence resume includes Dogma, Frida, and From Dusk Till Dawn, while Channing Tatum has what, Step Up and a few Magic Mike’s under his belt? Come on.
Regardless of their technical dancing abilities, making a movie is hard, which means that no matter how good a dancer she is, there can always be a terrible mistake. Hayek recounted a time while filming the upcoming Magic Mike installment when Tatum almost killed her, probably because he was jealous of her dance moves.
The actress told Jimmy Kimmel that there was one elaborate dance sequence that almost ended badly. “This one part that’s not in [the movie] where I’m upside down, and my legs had to be somewhere. 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,” Hayek explained. Tatum quickly swooped in to save her, though it didn’t go very well.
“[Channing] 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, because it was the set of Magic Mike, so anything is possible. “Instead of putting my hands to protect my head, I just held onto the pants. He’s like, ‘Put your hands up,’ and I’m like, ‘No, no, no, no.’” Hayek then added that the crew came in and helped her down, and she was furious that a supposed professional dancer such as Channing Tatum almost let her down. “[Channing] said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I said, ‘What’s wrong with me? You nearly killed me!’”
Despite the hiccup, Hayek says that she was happy to be working on set with all of those shirtless men. “You know what was my day going into the office? I would just sit around and watch, like, 12 men, semi-naked dancing and doing pirouettes,” Hayek told Entertainment Tonight last month. “And I got to boss them around.” Except for that one time when she almost got a concussion, it seems like she had a great time on set! You can watch her interview with Jimmy Kimmel above.
Magic Mike’s Last Dance hits theaters on February 10th.