Channing Tatum burns up the stage in “Magic Mike’s Last Dance”

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Channing Tatum reprises his iconic role as stripper Mike Lane in Warner Bros. Pictures’ new musical comedy “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.”

In the film, “Magic” Mike Lane (Tatum) takes to the stage again after a lengthy hiatus, following a business deal that went bust, leaving him broke and taking bartender gigs in Florida. For what he hopes will be one last hurrah, Mike heads to London with Maxandra Mendoza, a wealthy socialite (Salma Hayek Pinault) who lures him with an offer he can’t refuse…and an agenda all her own. With everything on the line, once Mike discovers what she truly has in mind, will he—and the roster of hot new dancers he’ll have to whip into shape—be able to pull it off?

Tatum explains, “Mike and Maxandra meet at a very interesting moment in their lives. Mike had taken his furniture company as far as it could go and it folded; Max had been in a marriage for a number of years and it’s fallen apart. They are both at this crossroads, thinking, ‘Who do I want to be now? What do I do now?’ That’s where we meet them, and where they meet each other.”

For Tatum, stepping back into Mike’s shoes meant putting himself through a rigorous training routine, as well as workshopping and creating his dance numbers from scratch with the choreography team.

“At 42, it’s a whole different thing than when I was actually dancing at 19,” Tatum laughs. “It’s a full-time job, one-hundred percent. And the dancers, for me, were the reason to do the movie. They’re killers, each and every single one of them can do something that no one else on the planet can do as well; they’re one of a kind. And because of the Magic Mike Live shows around the world there are so many of them, so it was really hard to pick which dancers we wanted for the movie.”

One of the seminal performance scenes in the movie was inspired by, as Tatum describes it, “a very, very arresting dance that really takes your breath away.” The number involves a massive amount of water. “Working out a dance with water is very chancy, because you don’t know how slippery it will be at any moment, so we had to learn this over months of practice and really give our utter bodies and souls to it.”

Long before leaving for filming in London, Tatum got back into a routine of working out and rehearsing for hours each day, which continued throughout filming once he reached London.

A Warner Bros. Pictures Presentation, “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” slides into theaters now.